It's always interesting to get Umair's take on big issues because his training as an economist shines through. Here he's talking about a crisis in investment, that I, with my training as an engineer, have been calling the "Infrastructure Crisis".
When you build infrastructure, be it an interstate, dam, bridge, or airport. You have to maintain it. Anyone who has ever owned a home knows this basic fact of life.
Things require maintenance and that costs money.
Here in the US, the favorite tactic of Republicans looking to slash state budgets to the bone has been to stop doing maintenance on things. All sorts of things like roads, bridges, and dams.
There are 600,000 bridges in the United States as of 2019.
Here’s the part that’s scary, of that 600,000, 54,000 are in critical need of repair. At today’s state and federal funding levels it will take 80 years for just those 54,000 bridges to be fixed and made safe.
That’s how badly infrastructure maintenance and repair is being funded in the United States, the richest country on earth. In most of the rest of the world infrastructure is even more underfunded and neglected.
There are 91,000 dams in the US, the average age of these dams is 57 years old.
Aside from about 1,500 dams owned by federal agencies. Regulating dam safety is chiefly a state responsibility, and states vary widely in their commitment to the task.
Across the nation, each state dam inspector is responsible on average for about 200 dams. A daunting ratio, but in some states the number is much higher.
Oklahoma, for example, employs just three full-time inspectors for its 4,621 dams.
Iowa has three inspectors for its 3,911 dams.
Largely because of its legislators’ distrust of regulation, Alabama doesn’t even have a safety program for its 2,273 dams.
Are you sensing a pattern here?
The fuckwit grifters White Republicans like to elect have been running their states into the ground. Things in those states are falling apart and these colossal asshats voted against the program that wanted to make a down payment on fixing the problem.
White America aka Trumpublican America voted “as a unified bloc” against the Build Back Better Bill. They voted against fixing things.
The American Society of Civil Engineers has given the American dam system a grade of “D” every year since 1998 and recommended an aggressive program of repairs and improvements. Almost nothing has been done.
A dam failure or a bridge collapse is a disaster. But they are only a tiny part of the world that we have built.
Modern life needs water treatment plants, water distribution systems, sewage handling systems, electrical grids, communication systems, port facilities, roads, highways, railroads, airports, hospitals, police facilities, fire control facilities. The list of things that have to work “behind the scenes” is endless.
As you might guess and fear, almost all of it has had maintenance neglected and underfunded.
Even without climate change as a stressor, our country and the rest of the world, was facing a crisis of infrastructure collapse.
Because of Under-investment.
Just on its own, solving this crisis of "everything breaking down all at once" was going to require large scale mobilization of funds and resources to resolve. Now imagine all that decaying infrastructure having to cope with the massive new stresses climate change is bringing.
The question is not IF we are going to start seeing dams and bridges in this country fail.
The question is WHEN will they start failing regularly and how many per year will become the new normal?
For the rest of this decade, the infrastructure you depend on is going to be falling apart and failing. Unless people start voting to fix this, things are going to get incredibly bad, incredibly fast.
