Headline: Nation's Infrastructure Crumbling, Report Says: Engineers warn roads, airports and power plants are headed for multiple breakdowns. More than $1 trillion is needed for repairs.

Source: Los Angeles Times, 8 Mar 2001

URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20010308/t000020499.html

WASHINGTON--As the nation speeds into the Internet Age, its old-economy infrastructure of airports, school buildings, power plants and roads is overwhelmed and heading for multiple breakdowns, a leading engineering group is warning in a "report card" to be issued today.

The evaluation by a special panel of the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the U.S. infrastructure an overall grade of "D+." The group estimated that taxpayers at the federal, state and local levels would have to invest $1.3 trillion in the next five years to remedy the wide-ranging bottlenecks.

"If we can't get goods to market or people to jobs, our economy is going to have a real serious problem," said Robert Bein, an Irvine consulting engineer who is president of the 123,000-member professional organization. "The nation has been concentrating on other priorities, and we haven't done the job we needed to do."

Aviation has deteriorated more dramatically than any other transportation system, the engineering group concluded. Awarded a "B-" as recently as 1988, the system gets a "D" in the latest report card. "We have had a 37% increase in traffic and a 1% increase in capacity," said Jim Davis, executive director of the society.

The group found that 58% of roads are in poor, fair or mediocre condition and that 29% of bridges are rated structurally deficient or obsolete for the level of traffic they are carrying. In California, Bein said, roads that are poorly designed or maintained are a contributing factor in 30% of the traffic deaths, according to his own studies.

The engineering society hopes its findings will spur a national effort to redirect resources to such mundane things as roads and sewage plants, which are nonetheless critical to the smooth operation of a modern society. "We need to come together as we did when we built the railroads and the interstate system," Davis said. Yet environmental concerns and local opposition to disruptive projects have made the politics of infrastructure development almost impossible, he added.

"We used to talk about NIMBY--not in my back yard," Davis said. "Now they're calling it BANANA--build absolutely nothing anywhere not anytime."

The report card rates progress in 12 areas: roads, bridges, mass transit, aviation, schools, drinking water, waste water, solid waste, hazardous waste, navigable waterways, dams and energy.

The highest grade is a "C+" for solid waste disposal because of recycling programs that have reduced the amount of material going into landfills. The lowest is a "D-" for school construction, which has failed to meet the needs of the baby boom echo, a generation of more than 70 million children of the original baby boomers.

"President Bush's education program deals with curriculum and teaching--what we're saying is that you also have to provide the buildings for the kids," Bein said.

But for the most part, the engineering group's conclusions and recommendations parallel policy positions that are being staked out by the new administration. For example, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has called for the construction of new power plants and exploitation of domestic oil and gas over the objections of environmental groups. And Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta has said the gap between demand and capacity on the nation's roads and airways is the leading problem in transportation. Bush's budget fully funds highway, aviation and transit programs authorized by Congress, but the engineering society said significantly higher levels of investment are needed.

The group predicted that mass transit will experience the sharpest growth of any form of transportation this decade. Transit ridership has increased by 15% since 1995, and systems such as Metrorail in Washington are now jammed with riders. Yet public funding is not keeping up with demand. About $10.8 billion a year is spent to maintain transit systems at their current level of performance, but the report says government at all levels spends only about $7.7 billion.

On the energy front, Washington policy makers have treated California's power crisis as an isolated phenomenon. But the engineering society said power-generating capacity is failing to keep up with demand around the country.

"It's not just a California problem, it's a national problem," Davis said. The group's report singles out the nation's network of power transmission lines as a special concern. It says the network depends on obsolete technology, and efforts to build new transmission systems are often blocked by local opposition.

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), March 08, 2001

Answers

Reports and articles like this are proliferating now, but were not in evidence in 1998 or before. Yes, they appeared in 1999, to prepare the public (gently) for a medium case Y2K outcome. It seems as if Y2K has subtly inflicted a case of "AIDS" on the infrastructure and Charlotte's Web, weakening it and reducing its margin of safety against overload, due to Y2K induced bottlenecks. Let's hope "opportunistic infections" don't cause matters to worsen further. The recent report by the National Infrastructure Protection Center is not encouraging in this regard. Even the "InfoMagic" worst- case Y2K scenario still cannot be altogehter ruled out, although the unfolding speed is much slower than envisioned in 1999, and malicious iatrogenic effects must play a much larger role, if it happens, than in InfoMagic's 1999 predictions of the Y2K outcome.

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), March 08, 2001.