Long-term survival of Legionella pneumophila in aquatic environments is thought to be important for establishing an ecological niche necessary for epidemic outbreaks in humans. Eliminating bacterial colonization in plumbing systems is the primary strategy that depletes this reservoir and prevents disease. To uncover L. pneumophila determinants facilitating survival in water, a Tn-seq strategy was used to identify survival-defective mutants during 50-day starvation in tap water at 42°C. The mutants with most drastic survival defects carried insertions in electron transport chain genes, indicating that membrane energy charge and/or ATP synthesis requires the generation of a proton gradient by the respiratory chain to maintain survival in the presence of water stress. In addition, periplasmically-localized proteins that are known (EnhC) or hypothesized (lpg1697) to stabilize the cell wall against turnover were essential for water survival. To test that the identified mutations disrupted water survival, candidate genes were knocked down by CRISPRi. The vast majority of knockdown strains with verified transcript depletion showed remarkably low viability after 50-day incubations. To demonstrate that maintenance of cell wall integrity was an important survival determinant, a deletion mutation in lpg1697, in a gene encoding a predicted L,D-transpeptidase domain, was analyzed. The loss of this gene resulted in increased osmolar sensitivity and carbenicillin hypersensitivity relative to the WT, as predicted for loss of an L,D-transpeptidase. These results indicate that the L. pneumophila envelope has been evolutionarily selected to allow survival under conditions in which the bacteria are subjected to long-term exposure to starvation and low osmolar conditions.