Our Failing Infrastructure

The news this morning wasn’t good: unemployment in October climbed to a twenty-five year high of 10.2 percent and is expected to grow. More troubling for those of us in the infrastructure field, last month the economy also lost about 62,000 construction jobs. While the Obama administration estimates on recovery.gov that as of October 30, 640,329 jobs have either been created or saved by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, clearly more must be done to stem the tide of continuing job losses.

You know another thing that’s still not getting any better? Yep, that’s right, you guessed it- the nation’s failing infrastructure! It’s been almost 10 months since ASCE graded the nation’s infrastructure at a D and estimated that it would cost $2.2 trillion over five years to bring it up to a good condition – and so far not much has changed.

So bad news all around, right? Well, if you don’t want to be too depressed on a Friday afternoon, why not take this opportunity to help put some of this right. We need engineers and anyone who cares about infrastructure to contact their legislators in support of these crucial issues that will improve infrastructure and put people to work:

1.                  Surface Transportation System Authorization – the nation’s transportation system has been operating on short-term extensions since SAFETEA-LU expired in September. This lack of action on new policy is keeping states from making long-term transportation plans or hiring new workers. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) this week called waiting on an authorization “wrong-headed” when so many people are out of work. Click here to send a message to your legislators instantly.

2.                  Clean Water Trust Fund – the nation’s water infrastructure system faces hundreds of billions of dollars worth of repairs, and yet no sustainable federal revenue source exists to pay for those needs. The Trust Fund would collect money from polluters and those who use water systems for product disposal and distribute it in a consistent manner to states for repair and rehabilitation of essential drinking water and wastewater treatment facilities.  The Fund would raise an estimated $11 billion per year through 2015. Click here to send a message to your legislators instantly.

3.                  Dam Rehabilitation and Repair Act – across the country, thousands of dams are aging. Most of these dams were built prior to development down stream, and now, should they fail, could cause major loss of life and property. The Dam Rehab bill would create a grant program to help states repair and modernize threatened dams. Click here to send a message to your legislators instantly.

The speedier travel time, more reliable water systems, and protection from unsafe dams should be reason enough to support any of these above issues. But think about the job someone would get designing, building, or maintaining any of this infrastructure and these pieces of legislation take on even more importance. So ask your elected officials for support today and let people in your community know how important a safe and efficient infrastructure is to our economy. 

The Virginia Section of ASCE this week released its 2009 Report Card for Virginia’s Infrastructure. The Old Dominion’s infrastructure rated a D+ overall.

The section’s first Report Card graded 13 infrastructure categories: aviation facilities, bridges, dams, drinking water systems, energy, parks and recreation, ports and navigable waterways, rail and transit, roads, schools, solid waste disposal facilities, stormwater management and wastewater. Individual category grades ranged from a high of B- for parks and recreation, to a low of D- for each of dams, roads and schools. The report also noted that failure to maintain and preserve the state’s resources, and to implement effective long-range infrastructure management plans, is having a negative impact on Virginia’s future.

“Commuters are losing hours each day to gridlock; the pipes that carry drinking water into our homes are aging, overused and in some case, contaminated; and our children’s classrooms are becoming increasingly crowded,” said Thomas L. Fitzgerald, section president, and chair of the Report Card Committee. “Robust infrastructure is a vital component of the health of the state’s economy and its ability to attract business and industry. Even more importantly, it is also vital to supporting and protecting the health and safety of Virginians.”

The Virginia Section also noted that Dams received a low grade of D- since new state regulations enacted in 2008 nearly doubled the number of dams requiring state inspection. Despite these stricter guidelines, the state has not provided any additional funds to carry out the inspections.

To read the full report, visit ASCE Virginia’s website.

NBC 12 in Richmond also did a great piece on the Report Card and Virginia’s failing infrastructure.

A water main installed in the 1870s- yes the horse and buggy 1870s- ruptured this morning in New York City, causing major flooding and transportation disruptions. The NY Times City Blog paints a pretty grim picture:

A 12-inch cast-iron water main installed in 1870 broke in Lower Manhattan early Friday morning, flooding about a dozen buildings, forcing the evacuation of several structures, and sending water gushing over the area at least three blocks around the site … The water was up to four feet deep in some buildings at the height of the flood, around 5 a.m. Service on the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 subway lines was interrupted for a while, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is continuing to warn of delays in service along those lines, as well as on the M20, M22 and X25 bus routes.

While I hate to say “I told you so” after a disaster, this rupture brings home the need to do two crucial things recommended by the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure:

1.      (specific) Invest in modernizing the nation’s water infrastructure

2.      (general) Plan, design, and operate resilient critical infrastructure systems to withstand and recover from disruptions.

It might not be much consolation to the people up in NYC today dealing with damages to homes and business or who are unable to travel, but there are some tools we can use to keep problems like this from happening again.

Firstly, we need to support legislation that increases revenues for water infrastructure. The federal government’s share of water infrastructure investments has dropped dramatically over the last few decades and local governments are left shouldering a financial burden too big to handle. A new proposal in Congress, the Water Protection and Reinvestment Act raises revenues from a variety of sources to fund a Trust Fund for drinking and wastewater infrastructure. An easy thing for you to do is visit ASCE Report Card Action Center and send an email to your legislators instantly asking them to support the bill.

Second, the delays to vehicle, bus, and rail travel in a busy downtown area this break is causing illustrate how interconnected our infrastructure systems are. A new publication form ASCE Guiding Principles for Critical Infrastructure gives engineers and policymakers a framework for not only protecting infrastructure in a disaster, but making sure all systems (transportation, water, emergency services) work together to keep people safe and get things back on track.  

Most of these problems won’t be fixed over night – NYC itself probably has hundreds of miles of century-old pipes – but we need to start somewhere. Infrastructure failures are often tragedies with both human and economic costs, but they also show us where we need to be doing better. Thankfully it looks like no one got hurt this time, but let’s not sit around and wait for another break to happen we need more money to build a safer, smarter system.  

Political Blog Daily Kos has a great posting today about the worst roads in America and what it means for our future prosperity and travel.

The posting sites traffic and road condition data from numerous sources including ASCE (I couldn’t resist the shameless self-promotion) and publishes the results of a recent Freakonomics Blog  survey of drivers about the worst roads across the country.

From Daily Kos: The economic stimulus bill passed earlier this year dedicated $48 billion to transportation infrastructure. However, the Department of Transportation was saying 4 years ago they needed $500 billion over 6 years to deal with congestion & fix everything that’s weathered, broken, or in need of replacement. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2009 Report Card on America’s infrastructure estimated a need for about another trillion in funding over 5 years to substantially improve bridge & road conditions.

Click here to read the rest of the post and see if the road you drive everyday made it into the Hall of Shame

Then again, you might not.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has emerged as one of the leaders in the fight to increase the pot of money available to build and maintain the nation’s highways, bridges and transit systems.  This is surprising because the right-leaning business group is usually the sort of group to oppose a tax increase.  However, in supporting a gas tax increase – something that hasn’t happened at the federal level since the late 1980s – the Chamber is recognizing that not funding these improvements ends up costing us more in other ways:  wasted time, wasted fuel, damage to vehicles, etc.  The Texas Transportation Institute and others have put numbers on these “hidden taxes” and they turn out to be quite substantial, and more importantly to businesses, far less predictable than a traditional tax.  At a time when everyone needs to squeeze a bit more out of their dollars, this predictability factor becomes very important.  And much of the “revenue” from these “hidden taxes” evaporates, in the form of pollution, rather than being funneled back into maintaining and improving the system as a traditional fuel tax would be. 

The Transportation Construction Coalition (of which ASCE is an active member), one of the more “usual suspects” in the fight for improving the nation’s transportation infrastructure is leading the charge against a lengthy delay in reauthorization of federal transportation legislation with a new ad campaign directed towards decision-makers in Washington, D.C.

View the latest TCC ad

If you haven’t already, let your lawmakers know that delaying the transportation authorization will not help improve the nation’s poor infrastructure conditions.  Visit ASCE’s “Click & Connect” with Congress advocacy website to draft your personalized message to your lawmakers.

Everyone seems to be pinching pennies or clipping coupons these days. Why not add throwing money down the drain to the list?

No, not wasting money, I mean investing in our water infrastructure. Other than when they back up or break, most of us don’t give much thought to the pipes in our community that bring us potable drinking water or take away and clean our wastewater. But believe me, the pipes are there, and they’re working overtime to meet the demands we put on them everyday.

While it may seem like things are OK since we get our water out of the tap same as always, the water infrastructure system is not currently equipped to handle growing capacity. Pipes that were laid in the early part of the 20^th century in many cities are at the end or past their design lives. Additionally, these older systems must be upgraded to meet new regulations for environmental quality. ASCE’s 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure graded the nation’s drinking and wastewater systems at a D- and estimated that it would cost $255 billion over five years to bring systems up to a good condition.

That steep price tag, like with most infrastructure, has stymied governments at every level. Currently, the federal government invests only about $4 billion a year in water per year and many cities and towns don’t have the resources to keep systems from decaying further.

To begin tackling the funding challenge, ASCE will be standing along others in the water infrastructure industry and a bipartisan group of legislators tomorrow to announce the introduction of the Water Protection and Reinvestment Act. Sponsored by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, this bill would create a $10 billion annual fund to begin crucial repairs and improvements to the nation’s drinking and wastewater systems.

Following the announcement, ASCE Report Card Advisory Council Member Dale Jacobson, P.E., BCEE, F.ASCE will testify before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in support of the legislation.

You may watch the hearing tomorrow (7/15/09) afternoon live online at 2 PM EST on the T&I Committee’s website.

For additional information on a Clean Water Trust Fund, read this recent GAO Report.

And remember, the next time you think you are just throwing money down the drain, it probably needs it.  

*** Once the water trust fund bill is introduced, check back here for a link to send your representative an instant email asking them to support the bill.***

The National Journal’s Transportation Expert’s Blog features commentary on current issues in transportation policy. As one of the regular contributors a.k.a. one of the experts, on the blog, ASCE’s Executive Director Patrick J. Natale, P.E. has been discussing ways to improve the nation’s transportation infrastructure with other leaders in the industry. The blog is free to the public and offers in-depth analysis on all aspects of the federal transportation system.

This past week’s discussion focused on a new proposal from Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) to create a national transportation plan that improves both infrastructure quality and meets certain environmental goals. The blog’s editors asked if one of the key tenets of the legislation – reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) – was a good place to start.

Here’s Pat’s answer:

As with most things in life, there’s a little bit of good, a little bit of bad and a whole lot of maybe in this plan. Certainly, we need to have specific performance goals for our infrastructure, and from those goals we need to develop comprehensive, long-term plans. When it comes to transportation, I would argue that increased safety, eased mobility and improved conditions should be the focal points. While the bill does set some specific goals that could produce laudable results, including ones for emissions reduction, such specifics for the infrastructure provisions—VMT reduction, transit use, congestion relief, etc.—are lacking. That’s a pretty important omission, given that the infrastructure-related targets are the tools we need to reach the environmental goals. A truly comprehensive plan is more complicated than just looking at it through a lens of emissions reductions. Environmental restoration should absolutely be one factor taken into account, but so should offering options for travel other than just highways. If we aren’t putting any money into…

Visit the blog site to read the rest…

Also in the news this week…

Chairman of ASCE’s Report Card Advisory Council Andrew Herrmann, P.E., F.ASCE has a great article in Aspire magazine about the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.

After many, many months of waiting, the new surface transportation authorization bill is expected to be released tomorrow, June 17. The current authorization, SAFETEA-LU, expires on September 30.

Two federally chartered commissions, as well as most groups in the transportation industry, have recommended a transformational change in the way the federal government oversees transportation. Most of the recommendations center on changing the focus of the Department of Transportation from operating many different modes and programs to reconfiguring the programs to meet specific goals such as freight movement or environmental stewardship. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar (D-MN) has indicated that there will be major program reformation, as recommended, but hasn’t released specifics. The release of the bill will finally illustrate what he intends to do.

ASCE graded the nation’s Roads at a D- , Transit at a D , and   Bridges at a C on the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure and also recommends major transportation program reforms. The Society will be monitoring the progress of the bill and reporting on it periodically on this blog.

For more information on ASCE’s transportation recommendations, please visit ASCE’s policy website.  

I’m blogging today from the World Environmental and Water Resources Congress  sponsored by the Environmental and Water Resources Institute of ASCE in Kansas City, Missouri. Over 800 engineers from around the world have gathered to share the latest advances in their field and to network with peers.

As part of the program, ASCE is presenting the findings of the 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. We’re showing engineers how they can use the Report Card to educate the public and lawmakers about the state the nation’s infrastructure and what they can do to improve it. In a keynote address to the entire conference group, ASCE 2008-2009 President D. Wayne Klotz, P.E., D.WRE, F.ASCE, gave an overview of the Report Card’s water and environment categories and made a special request to the attendees to use their professional expertise to advocate for the infrastructure  improvement this country so desperately needs.

A “water guy” himself, Klotz reminded the group that as environmental engineers, they don’t just design and operate drinking and wastewater systems, they provide clean that is essential to public health. In so many parts of the world, he said, people don’t have access to safe drinking water and sanitation services – which leads to disease and inhibits economic development.

Luckily, engineers at the conference –and anyone reading from home- can take immediate action on water issues. The Senate is currently considering legislation, the Water Infrastructure Financing Act (S.1005) that would authorize about $39 billion in drinking, waste, and stormwater investments. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved the bill last week and now it moves to the full Senate for consideration. The full House already passed similar legislation (H.R. 1272) by a vote of 317-101 on March 12 that only included clean water initiatives - the differences in the bills will be worked out later in a conference committee.   You can send an email to your Senator and ask them to support final passage of the bill by visiting ASCE’s Click and Connect with Congress advocacy website.

As engineers talk with friends and colleagues, it’s important to use your expert technical background to educate others about the state of the nation’s infrastructure. Studies show that the public views engineers as authoritative sources for information: now you just need to get out there and prove them right! 

the National Journal has a great new feature, the Transportation Expert’s Blog, that brings together experts in the transportation policy field to discuss a wide range of topics and issues relating to transportation. This week’s topic questions the future of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) given the recent collapse of a deal to privatize Midway Airport in Chicago.

As an expert on the blog, ASCE’s Executive Director Patrick J. Natale, P.E., F.ASCE had this to say about the future of PPPs:

“Public private partnerships (PPPs) make the public nervous, particularly as they relate to the nation’s critical infrastructure systems. If PPPs are going to become well-established options for infrastructure financing—and they must given the staggering costs of addressing current and future needs—we need to acknowledge that fact and address it head on. “

You can read the rest of this post on the blog.

In other news…

The Michigan Section of ASCE just released their own state Report Card that grades the state’s infrastructure at a D. Civil Engineers in Michigan believe that improving infrastructure is essential in a state that has in recent years seen major economic decline, “Michigan’s infrastructure is in dire condition. Reversing the decay of our most valuable assets is essential to reviving Michigan’s fortunes.” said the authors of the report.