Dihydrogen Monoxide

The stuff that chemtrails are made of. Water is a chemical, though "chemical" tends to be reserved for the scary stuff (or what is thought to be scary, dog whistles, etc) in this most enlightened and progressive of nations.

Maintenance is a cost center, something to be cut, cut, cut by those with an eye to efficiency. Or maybe there's not enough tax revenue to support the sprawl? Lack of maintenance also applies to computer systems (and IT is also a cost center); one can draw parallels between a mostly failed water treatment system that does not monitor pressure, among other failings, and an almost failed computer where nobody checks whether the drive is getting full. Among other failings. Of course users do not like it when you tell them "at current rates of disk usage growth, your system will run out of space in two weeks, so you'll either need to clean things up, or buy more disks, or wait until the disk being full causes a really bad day". It can be tough to be a messanger.