We’ve been thinking about water a lot lately, partly because the building that houses our newsroom doesn’t have any. For several weeks, a number of businesses and homes on Maple Avenue have been without water, as the long and deep freezes of this past winter have shut down supply lines from the village’s water main.

We’re lucky, though, because we can run a hose — it looks like a giant black snake — from the attached building, which has its own supply line. Up and down our street, neighbors have helped each other in this way.

Still, it has made us aware of what it must be like to live permanently in a place where water is not readily available with a turn of the hand at a tap.

So we had keen interest in covering Congressman Paul Tonko’s “Water Infrastructure Tour” last week, which concluded in a discussion at Altamont’s village hall. Around the table were three mayors, an engineer, representatives from government agencies, and water superintendents — all with an interest in rural water supplies.

We like the congressman’s idea. He told us he wanted to “develop a tour concept” so other legislators would tour water facilities across the United States to raise awareness about the needs of both aging infrastructure and aging water stewards. Tonko said the average age of those who run water plants is 56.

We can see bridges and roads in need of repair but rarely think of the underground water and sewer systems — until something goes wrong.

Stories of hardship were shared around the table last Friday, covered in our page-one story. Delanson is out of compliance with state regulations since Tropical Storm Irene took out the village’s well. Westerlo has a relatively new system with a user price so high that the hamlet it serves has empty buildings, foreclosed, as businesses and residents build in places where they can drill wells instead. Mention was made of Guilderland’s levels of trihalomethanes — formed by treating water with chlorine — that were over the allowed limit; the town’s supervisor said this week the problem had been solved with a multi-million-dollar restructuring of pipes and another $2 million filtration system.

And Altamont finds itself unable to get funding for needed repairs on old water mains — nearly a quarter of the village’s 15 miles of water mains were installed in the 1930s. “We’re in a loophole,” said Jeffrey Moller, Altamont’s superintendent of public works. The village’s mean household income, said the mayor, is $2,000 to $3,000 over the threshold to get grants.

Defining the problems is a first and necessary step. Solving them will be harder but the raised consciousness Tonko envisions with across-the-country tours will help. He’d like to see the Energy and Commerce Committee work with the Transportation Committee, which oversees water and sewer, to come up with an omnibus bill to solve infrastructure problems.

Two ideas shared at Friday’s roundtable talk had merit; both of them involved a larger reach than individual municipalities, linking the haves with the have-nots.

Pat Scalera, with the New York Rural Water Association, said that NYWARN is successful in helping with emergencies because it spans a bigger area. New York’s Water/Wastewater Agency Response Network of utilities promotes statewide emergency preparedness, disaster response, and mutual aid for public and private water and wastewater utilities.

“If one place is wiped out,” Scalera said, a far-away locale can send equipment and labor. In the wake of storms like Sandy, Irene, or Lee, she said, items like generators were shipped to communities in need.

We urge municipalities to join, if they haven’t already. Membership in NYWARN is free and is open to all public and private water and wastewater systems operating in New York State. It is basically neighbors helping neighbors in need, like the hosed water now being shared on Altamont’s Maple Avenue.

Implementing the second idea would take some work — the system is not in place. Joseph Keegan, the mayor of Castleton, who had testified before Tonko’s committee in Washington, spoke of another group that had testified, from Mississippi, that had to boil for six months because the community couldn’t afford to pay for repairs to its water system.

Keegan recommended a system for water infrastructure similar to that for landline telephone users. Everyone, he said, pays a small monthly fee that goes into a general pool so that, when a repair is needed, say, after a storm, there are funds to draw from and therefore response is swift.

The more far-reaching the solutions, the better. We applaud Tonko for seeing water availability as a national problem and working to address it that way. But we should look further still.

Water is a global issue. Sunday was World Water Day and the United Nations released its “Water for a Sustainable World” report. Its predictions, if we stay on our current course, are dire: Water resources worldwide by 2030 may meet only 60 percent of demand, which will increase by 15 percent.

The report includes such scary fact-based predictions as these: Groundwater supplies are diminishing with an estimated 20 percent of the world’s aquifers currently over-exploited; the world’s slum population, which is expected to reach nearly 900 million by 2020, is often without adequate water and sanitation and is also more vulnerable to the impact of extreme weather events; and global water demand for the manufacturing industry is expected to increase by 400 percent from 2000 to 2050, the bulk of it in developing countries.

The report stresses and explores the far-reaching effects of water availability. “Water flows through the three pillars of sustainable development — economic, social and environmental,” writes Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the U.N. “Water resources, and the essential services they provide are among the keys to achieving poverty reduction, inclusive growth, public health, food security, lives of dignity for all and long-lasting harmony with earth’s essential ecosystems.”

“Unless the balance between demand and finite supplies is restored,” the report says, “the world will face an increasingly severe global water deficit.”

But the report also offers a vision — which its authors say is “not merely a fictional utopian outlook” — of a future in which water is recognized and managed as the fundamental resource that supports all aspects of sustainable development.

So what does that mean? In its 1987 report, “Our Common Future,” the U.N. defined “sustainable development” as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The current report’s lead author, Richard Connor, writes in the preface, “Although the concept of sustainable development may be straightforward, different stakeholders tend to see the challenges and potential solutions from their particular — and often varying — perspectives.”

The report then outlines challenges “at the interface of water and sustainable development” for each region of the world — Europe and North America, Asia and the Pacific, the Arab region, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa.

We, in our part of the world, are advised to become more efficient in using water, to reduce waste and pollution, to change consumption patterns, and to choose appropriate technologies.

Municipal projects can help with this. For example, Guilderland’s wastewater treatment plant on Nott Road is the site of an experimental pilot project conducted by a renewable energy company. The process is meant to reduce the energy needed to clean wastewater.

While, as always, we urge national leadership on this critical issue, we recognize something so essential can seem unimportant to leaders of a rich nation; it is easy to insulate ourselves.

In the meantime, we urge citizens to act individually.

Why water your lawn or flower garden when you can plant native species that will flourish without wasting precious water?

Why drink water out of a plastic bottle? Americans throw away an estimated 60 million plastic water bottles daily; each bottle takes three times as much water to make as it holds, and millions of gallons of fuel are wasted transporting the bottled water, not to mention the greenhouse gases produced from manufacturing plastic.

We vividly remember talking to Charles Banda six years ago. Banda, from Malawi, founded the Freshwater Project to install wells and latrines in his home country. He was visiting Guilderland’s Farnsworth Middle School to thank the students there for raising $6,000 to pay for a well in Chigombe.

He told us he had been a preacher, but it was hard for people to gather to hear him preach because of widespread disease. He said of his Freshwater Project, “I’m doing this because of the people dying from cholera, dying from typhoid, dying from malaria.”

In the villages where he’s installed wells, he said, the rate of water-borne diseases has decreased from 70 percent to 2 percent, and the school dropout rate for girls had gone from 40 percent to 6 percent.

Banda told the middle school students how girls from villages in his country learned to carry water on their heads as soon as they could walk, and how, when they were older, they would rise at 4 a.m. to carry water for morning chores and repeat the duty for school, and for evening chores.

The world seemed smaller that day. We are going to keep that in mind the next time we’re about to do something wasteful with water.

As the United Nations report puts it: “The principle of equity, perhaps more than any technical recommendation, carries with it the promise of a more water-secure world for all.”

— Melissa Hale-Spencer