Saving $140/day at the risk of $100M damage to infrastructure is not good financial sense. It's the financial sense exercised by the kind of person who expects someone else to pay for the mess, i.e. a government official. A private corporation which was exposed to the liability would have likely chosen to raise the price of water to pay for the corrosion inhibitor, but someone whose job is to manipulate the balance sheet for political gain has a different utility function. We handle this with rules.
If that private corporation were a mining company in Montana they would choose to take the profits, go bankrupt, and again have the people pay to clean up the mess.
But if you want to erase your student loan debt with bankruptcy you're a lazy mooch who should just get a part time job to pay for college like I did back in the '60s. /s
