In addition, it could also produce what Rendell described as “a whole boatload of orders for American steel and concrete and timber companies.…22 it would be a huge shot in the arm for the economy, probably the best economic stimulus you could do.”
As the debate over the stimulus began, Tom Friedman, knowing the need and seeing the opportunity, declared: “The next few months are among the most important in U.S. history.”23
But our leaders certainly didn’t act like that was the case. Instead of focusing on infrastructure and job creation—and the gravity of the crisis at hand—we got a load of business-as-usual partisan bickering, special interest lobbying, and pork barrel spending.
The result was a bill Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University economist who was instrumental in transitioning the economic system of the former Soviet Union, called “a fiscal piñata,” an “astounding mish-mash of tax cuts, public investments, transfer payments and special treats for insiders,” and “a grab bag of hasty short-run spending.”24
In the end, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allotted only $72 billion to infrastructure projects.25 “I fear that we may soon look back and say that we missed a huge chance to go bigger and bolder,” Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy, told me at the time the bill was being debated.26 “After all, there were three flaws with the old economy that has crashed: It favored consumption over production; debt over smart savings; and environmental damage over environmental renewal. Some parts of the stimulus package seem to be more of the same—trying to prop up the old, failed economy. That strategy simply won’t work—but we could waste a lot of money and time trying. Instead, we need a new direction for our economy.”
Faced with an even more devastating economic crisis, FDR responded with a large-scale public works program, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps—programs that gave us much of the infrastructure that needs to be updated today.27 But instead of doing something similar—and instead of constructing a new economic vessel capable of navigating the stormy seas of the twenty-first century—we chose to grab a bucket and try to bail out the old sinking ship.
Moving forward, the price we’ll pay for getting it wrong is extremely high. Think of a patient suffering from a grave viral infection who is treated with antibiotics, effective only against bacterial infections. Not only will the treatment be unsuccessful, it will also dangerously delay the proper care.
POWER BLACKOUTS, RUSTY WATER, COLLAPSED BRIDGES, RAW SEWAGE LEAKS: A GUIDED TOUR OF THIRD WORLD AMERICA
Extending the medical metaphor just a tad longer: Having failed to treat our ailment properly, we must continue to deal with the symptoms that rage all around us. What follows are the results of our nation’s latest infrastructure checkup. The prognosis is definitely not good.
Let’s start this examination of what’s ailing America with that most elemental of elements: water. No society can survive without clean water. It’s essential for life and civilization (imagine the Roman Empire without its aqueducts). Clean, fresh water is so essential that many believe that, in the coming decades, wars will be fought over it. Among them is Steven Solomon, author of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization, who believes the world can be divided into water haves and water have-nots (Egypt, China, and Pakistan are among the have-nots).28
“Consider what will happen,” he writes, “in water-distressed, nuclear-armed, terrorist-besieged, overpopulated, heavily irrigation-dependent and already politically unstable Pakistan when its single water lifeline, the Indus River, loses a third of its flow from the disappearance of its glacial water source.”
Despite the indispensable nature of water, America’s drinking-water system is riddled with aging equipment that has been in the ground for one hundred years—or longer.29 Indeed, some of the nation’s tap water continues to run through cast-iron pipes built during the Civil War.30 As a result of leaking pipes, we lose an estimated seven billion gallons of clean water every day.31
According to a New York Times analysis of data from the Environmental Protection Agency, “a significant water line bursts on average every two minutes somewhere in the country.”32 Washington, D.C., averages a water line break every day.33 “We have about two million miles of pipe in this nation,” says Steve Allbee of the EPA.34 “If you look at what we’re spending now and the investment requirements over the next twenty years, there’s a $540 billion difference.”
Even now, our tap water is becoming less and less safe to drink—in some places our citizens are already forced to fetch fresh water from tanks stored on the back of trucks, our version of the Third World communal pump.35
Meanwhile, America’s wastewater treatment facilities are also fast deteriorating. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, “Older systems are plagued by chronic overflows during major rainstorms and heavy snowmelt and are bringing about the discharge of raw sewage into U.S. surface waters.36 The EPA estimated in August 2004 that the volume of combined sewer overflows discharged nationwide is 850 billion gallons per year. Sanitary sewer overflows, caused by blocked or broken pipes, result in the release of as much as 10 billion gallons of raw sewage yearly.”
The wall between fresh water and tainted water has become increasingly porous.
PULLING THE PLUG ON OUR ELECTRIC GRID
Next up, electricity. America is an increasingly wired society. Advances in technology mean more electronic devices—and more demand for energy. Yet the delivery of electricity today doesn’t differ much from the way it was done more than a hundred years ago when Thomas Edison brought the first commercial power grid online in New York.
While demand for electricity has risen 25 percent since 1990, the construction of transmission plants has dropped 30 percent.37 Since we need all the power we can get, companies are finding it nearly impossible to take facilities offline for proper maintenance—leading to breakdowns and unplanned outages.38 These ongoing brownouts and blackouts—some lasting seconds, some lasting days—result in more than $80 billion in commercial losses a year.39 The ASCE estimates that it could take as much as $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion over the next twenty years to fully update and expand the grid.40
On August 14, 2003, we got a glimpse of what we can expect a lot more of if we don’t make that investment.41 That muggy Thursday, an estimated fifty-five million Americans and Canadians living in a nearly four-thousand-mile stretch from Michigan to Connecticut and Canada lost power in the largest blackout in North American history. In New York, traffic ground to a halt when 11,600 stoplights cut out, and stalled subways and trains stranded four hundred thousand commuters throughout the evening and into the night. The city was plunged into darkness. The impact was felt across the northern corridor of our country, from high-rise elevators to airports and communication networks. What happened? Power lines, heavy from increased demand, dipped into overgrown trees in Ohio, which triggered a series of malfunctions that led to the shutdown of at least 265 power plants throughout the Northeast.42
ON THE ROADS TO RUIN
America’s roads are also in miserable shape, with a third of the country’s roadways rated “poor” or “mediocre.”43 Again, our demand has far outstripped our capacity to meet it. From 1980 to 2005, the miles traveled by cars increased 94 percent (for trucks, mileage increased 105 percent).44 Yet there was only a 3.5 percent increase in highway lane miles.
But you don’t need those numbers to know that our roads are badly congested. You see it—and experience it—every day. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Infrastructure Report Card, “Americans spend 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic at a cost of $78 billion a year—$710 a year for each motorist.”45 City drivers have it particularly bad: They are stuck in traffic over 40 percent of their time on the road.46
In studying car crashes across the country, the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC) determined that badly maintain
ed or managed roads are responsible for $217 billion in car crashes annually—far more than headline-grabbing alcohol-related accidents ($130 billion) or speed-related pileups ($97 billion).47
But Americans are paying an even higher price for our deteriorating roads: According to the TCC, 53 percent of the forty-two thousand road fatalities each year are at least partially the result of poor road conditions.48 We are currently spending $70 billion annually on improving our highways—nowhere near the $186 billion a year that is needed.49 It’s a collision of need versus resources; for far too many of us, it can be fatal.
THE LONG AND GRINDING COMMUTE
There’s an additional twist on the traffic story. Over the past decade, high housing prices have forced many middle-class families to move farther and farther away from the overpriced cities they work in. Doing so has meant ever-longer commutes.
By the year 2000, each day, 3.5 million Americans headed out on “extreme commutes,” defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as travel times to and from work of three hours or more each day.50 That is twice the number of extreme commuters there were in 1990. One in eight workers—17.5 million Americans—are now out their front doors every morning and on their way to work by 6 A.M. For more and more of the middle class, life now consists of sleep, an arduous commute, work, another arduous commute, then back to sleep.51
These stressed-out Americans turbo-charge their long journeys to work with PowerBars, vats of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee … and loneliness. Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, found that there is a direct connection between the duration of a person’s commute and their sense of social isolation.52 By his calculations, every ten minutes of commuting results in 10 percent fewer social connections. “Commuting,” Putnam says, “is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.” A study by Swiss economists at the University of Zurich discovered that commuters with a one-hour commute each way need to earn 40 percent more than noncommuters just to pull even with the noncommuters’ level of satisfaction with their lives.53 It puts a whole new spin on the phrase “driven to succeed.”
AMERICA’S TRAINS GO OFF THE RAILS
America’s railway system is speeding down the tracks … in reverse.54 It’s one of the few technologies that has actually regressed over the past eighty years.
Tom Vanderbilt of Slate.com came across some pre–World War II train timetables and made a startling discovery: Many train rides in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s took less time than those journeys would today. For instance, in 1934, the Burlington Zephyr would get you from Chicago to Denver in around thirteen hours. The same trip takes eighteen hours today. “The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s,” Vanderbilt writes, “took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak’s Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours.”
At the moment, the only high-speed train in the United States is Amtrak’s Acela, which travels the Washington–New York–Boston line.55 And I use the term “high-speed” very loosely. While in theory the trains have a peak speed of 150 miles per hour, the average speed on the Northeast Acela route is just 71 miles per hour, with its trains frequently stuck behind slower-moving ones on the heavily traveled tracks.56 Meanwhile, countries such as Japan, France, and Italy all have reliable train services that surpass 200 miles per hour.57 Same with China. For example, the six-hundred-mile ride between Wuhan and Guangzhou is completed in three hours by bullet trains reaching 217 miles per hour; the airport rail link in Shanghai reaches a top speed of 268 miles per hour.58
The stimulus bill included $8 billion for high-speed rail projects in thirty states, linking cities such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago—$1.25 billion going to a high-speed rail corridor between Orlando and Tampa.59, 60 Of course, high-speed rail systems everywhere would be great, but there are obvious political considerations behind sprinkling the money all over the country.61 The fact is, the highest trafficked section of the nation’s rail system, the limping northeast corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C., is in dire need of renovation but received only $112 million.
So while this new investment is a start, it’s only a drop in the bucket.62 And while trains going over 200 miles per hour would be great, as Vanderbilt puts it, “We would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration.”
TROUBLED BRIDGES OVER WATER
Out-of-date, overpriced, slow-moving, rickety, and routinely late trains can be frustrating and inconvenient. Out-of-date bridges can be downright deadly—as we’ve seen in the past decade with high-profile bridge collapses in Minnesota and Oklahoma.
According to the Department of Transportation, one in four of America’s bridges is either “structurally deficient” or “functionally obsolete.”63 The numbers are even worse when it comes to bridges in urban areas, where one in three bridges is deficient (no small matter given the higher levels of passenger and freight traffic in our nation’s cities).
The problem is pretty basic: The average bridge in our country has a lifespan of fifty years and is now forty-three years old.64 We’d need to invest $850 billion over the next fifty years to get all of America’s bridges into good shape. That’s $17 billion a year. At the moment, we’re spending only $10.5 billion a year.
As a result, we all too often find our attention drawn to places such as Webbers Falls, Oklahoma.
It was May 2002, and Webbers Falls, 140 miles east of Oklahoma City, had been pounded by heavy rains.65 But that didn’t deter people from driving across Interstate 40 to get together with family and friends on a busy Memorial Day weekend. Some 35 miles west of the Arkansas state line, a long line of cars and trucks was crossing the 1967-built bridge, 1,988 feet of concrete and steel spanning the swollen Arkansas River.
Down in the river, towboat captain William Joe Dedmon was pushing two barges when he suffered an attack of cardiac arrhythmia, and the barges ended up hitting the bridge’s support.66 Up above, a six-hundred-foot section of the bridge suddenly gave way—and a dozen cars, two tractor-trailer rigs, and a horse trailer plunged seventy-five feet into the water below.67
In an instant, the Arkansas River turned into a graveyard—one littered with concrete slabs, diapers, dead horses, and broken car seats.68 Fourteen people died that day, including a three-year-old girl, and scores more were injured. “Officials set up a morgue inside city hall,” the Bowling Green Daily News reported.69 “Victims’ families were told to go to the community center in Gore, on the other side of the river.” Because of the high and murky water, divers had a hard time retrieving the dead from the cars that were submerged and stacked on top of one another in the river’s fast currents.
Six years later, one quarter of Oklahoma’s bridges still needed overhaul or replacement. Indeed, the state had the dubious distinction of leading the nation in the percentage of structurally deficient bridges.70 And Oklahoma is far from alone. In August 2007, the Interstate 35W steel truss bridge over the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis collapsed during evening rush hour, killing 13 and injuring 145.71 The bridge had been inspected each year by the state’s Department of Transportation, but clearly the patchwork repairs were not sufficient.72
All across the country, patch and pray remains the order of the day … until the next bridge comes falling down. How many more will it take—and how many more people have to die—before a more serious effort is made?
AMERICA’S DAMS: DAMNED IF WE DON’T FIX THEM
We’ve seen similar tragedies with America’s dams.
On March 16, 2006, the Ka Loko Dam in Kilauea, Hawaii, collapsed.73 “Seven people died when the Ka Loko Dam breached after weeks of heavy rain, sending 1.6 million tons of water downstream,” the Honolulu Star Bulletin reported. Among the dead were a child and a woman eight months pregnant. The breach created an ecological disaster of torn-up streams, reefs, and coastal waterways.74 The Ka Loko Dam was not considered a “high-hazard dam.” It was, however, like all dams, supposed to be regu
larly inspected. According to Hawaii congresswoman Mazie Hirono, it was not.75
Dams are a vital part of America’s infrastructure. They help provide water for drinking, irrigation, and agriculture, generate much-needed power, and offer protection from floods.
Yet our dams are growing old. There are more than 85,000 dams in America—and the average age is fifty-one years old.76 At the same time, more and more people are moving into developments located below dams that require significantly greater safety standards—but we’ve had a hard time keeping up with the increase in these so-called high-hazard dams. Indeed, we are falling further and further behind. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, “Over the past six years, for every deficient, high hazard potential dam repaired, nearly two more were declared deficient.”
It would take $12.5 billion over the next five years to properly upgrade our nation’s dams.77 The estimated spending on dams over that time is $5.05 billion—a projected shortfall of $7.45 billion. Plus, of our 85,000 dams, the federal government regulates fewer than 10,000.78 The rest are the responsibility of the states—most of which are facing large budget deficits. For example, the ASCE reports that in 2007 Texas had “only seven engineers with an annual budget of only $435,000 to regulate more than 7,500 dams. Worse still, Alabama does not have a dam safety program despite the fact that there are more than 2,000 dams in the state.”
In 2007, during congressional testimony on levee and dam safety programs, New York congressman John Hall gave an account of what some New York dams looked like after a period of heavy rains.79 “Yesterday,” he said, “I visited three dams, all of which are over one hundred years old, in my district. The Whaley Lake Dam has boils on its surface. It’s a dam that’s largely earth and rock with some concrete structure. It has a frozen relief valve for the emergency release forty-eight-inch pipe, and that valve is in the middle of the dam, where it would not be accessible were the dam being overtopped by high water.”
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