Cornelia Carrier: Infrastructure Wake-Up
Posted at 6:40 pm, August 2nd, 2007
First it was New Orleans levees, now the I-35 West bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Two examples of the country’s deteriorating infrastructure. Today on NPR’s Day to Day, Thomas Rooney, a civil engineer based in St. Louis, talking with Alex Cohen about bridge safety, shocked me by saying that one bridge collapses every week in the US! Twenty-five percent of bridges have been found deficient. That’s 100,000 bridges!
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issues report cards for America’s infrastructure, and estimates that $1.6 trillion is needed over a five-year period to bring the nation’s infrastructure to a good condition.
In its report on bridges ASCE says,
The Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) strategic plan states that by 2008, less than 25% of the nation’s bridges should be classified as deficient. If that goal were met, 1 in 4 bridges in the nation would still be deficient.
With the government bleeding money to fight the Iraq war and enamoured with tax cuts, where is this $1.6 trillion coming from? Rooney put it this way: “The engineering solutions are very simple, the political issues are very hard.”
Maybe the tragic bridge collapse will force our politicians to finally face these issues.
August 3rd, 2007 at 1:36 pm |
[...] Friday, August 3rd, 2007 in White Rose The I-35W bridge collapse provides an infrastructure wake up call,’ as 25.8% of U.S bridges are deemed “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, and questions are raised about the adequacy of the federal bridge inspection program, and about the ‘tax cut death toll.’ Blogroll [...]
August 3rd, 2007 at 5:38 pm |
And of course, conservatives will oppose the use of collective resources to improve public goods if it means they can’t profit from the projects in question or if the people come to believe that group action is more effective than ‘individualism’.
Unfortunately, the term ‘individualism’ is usually slung about to distract from the ever-present use of public resources to subsidize private profit.
Case in point: my home town, Springfield, Ohio, will use $2.2 million in federal funds–taxes gathered increasingly from the middle class–to clean up toxic waste remaining after decades of profitable operations by the International Harvester Company, operatons that might not have been so profitable if IH had been required to clean up its own mess.
In this instance, of course, socialism is perfectly all right with the cheerleaders of capitalism. In the meantime, IH shareholders escape the cost of their own business enterprise, and claim that they are not the only people to profit from the business.
The fact that they profited more than others, who will absorbe the collective cost of clean-up, matters little to these thieves.
June 22nd, 2012 at 2:03 pm |
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