No, these terms are not the standards by which people choose to divorce their spouses. Worse. They describe bridges that are simply insufficient to bear the traffic that drives across them every day. 12.8% of all the bridges and overpasses in my home state of California, over which 82,647,465 vehicular crossing occur daily, fall into one of these categories. And oh yes, America, they do fall and they do kill people. Look carefully at that picture above. This Minneapolis bridge – supporting I-35 across the Mississippi – collapsed during evening rush hour on August 1, 2007, killing 13 and injuring 145, some of them seriously. It was sudden and not caused by a freak storm or an earthquake. The worn out parts just failed, although some say it fell because of a design defect. 140,000 cars and trucks routinely drove on this structure every day.
California’s 12.8% is high for any state, but tiny Rhode Island, which doesn’t have that many bridges because of its size, has a structurally deficiency on its bridges that hits a whopping 21.6%! You might expect the car capital of America to take care of the roads upon which its manufactures drive, but with killing budget deficits, this state boasts a 13.1% deficiency rate. Pennsylvania legislators should cover their heads in shame with an unforgivable 26.5% bridge deficiency rating (their bridges average 50 years in age), and while the state has faced some nasty budget-crushing issues (the city of Harrisburg tried to file for federal bankruptcy protection), there is really no excuse to put so many of its residents in serious harm’s way with such dilapidated and antiquated structures.
Across the nation, DailyFinance.com (July 2nd) tells us that according to the Federal Highway Administration 11.5% of all of our bridges are unsafe. Meanwhile, every day, there are an average of 282,772,680 vehicular crossings over nearly 70 thousand dangerous American bridges every damned day. Speaking of dams: “American Rivers plays a lead role removing unsafe dams … nationwide. And it is critical work. Just look at these alarming numbers from the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) --
· There are more than 87,000 dams currently under state regulation nationwide
· 10,127 have been classified as high hazard, meaning they pose a serious threat to human life if they should fail
· Of those high hazard dams, 1,333 have been identified as structurally deficient or unsafe
· The average dam inspector in the US is responsible for more than 400 dams. The ASDSO recommends that each inspector is responsible for fewer than 50 dams.” AmericanRivers.org, March 8, 2010. Damn! No much reason for levity!
Speaking of levity, so many of this country’s levees were constructed without engineers by simply piling up dirt and stone, tamping them down, and moving on to the next water project. We don’t think much about floods, many from breaching levees, until they come to our town, perhaps even threatening cut off our water supply for years! “People tend to underestimate the power of floods: six inches of fast-moving water can knock you down; two feet of water can float most cars away. Floods kill an average of 127 Americans a year — more than tornadoes or hurricanes — and cause more than $2 billion of property damage annually, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.” New York Times, July 1, 2011.
But one of the most serious issues is looming in that vast tract of deltas and levees in the northern California Sacramento River basin. “[A major] threatening situation looms in California, especially around the San Francisco Bay Delta. The delta is the link between two-thirds of the state’s fresh-water supply — which originates in the Sierra Nevada and the rivers of the north — and two-thirds of the state’s population, which resides in the south. Starting in the 1870s, farmers began building 1,100 miles of levees around the delta to control floodwaters and create farmland out of tule marshes. Today many of those levees are old, decrepit and leaking. Jeffrey Mount, a geologist at the University of California, Davis, predicts that there is a 64 percent chance of a catastrophic levee failure in the delta in the next 50 years.” NY Times. Between storm surges, continuous saturating rain, earthquakes and just plain old dirt wall failures, the city of Sacramento itself could see 20 feet of water flooding its streets, while the entire southern part of the state would be parched for years as repairs were made to his antiquated system that is so vital to the state’s water supply.
But whether you are dealing with floodwaters off the Missouri River or the levee system that defines the area around New Orleans, we are truly vulnerable. “Many of the nation's levees are more than 50 years old and are showing their age. While there are newer or reconstructed levees, a large number of levees were built in response to the widespread flooding on the Mississippi River in 1927 and 1937, or in California after catastrophic flooding in 1907 and 1909… Levees reduce the risk of flooding cities large and small; more than 14 million people live behind levees and at least one-third of communities with a population of 50,000 or higher have some portion of their community protected by levees.” LeveeSafety.org.
The bad news is that there are lots and lots of levees in the United States, some on private land and others under state control, but we really don’t have a clear accounting that we might need to make a good decision here: “There is no definitive record of how many levees there are in the U.S., nor is there an assessment of the current condition and performance of those levees. Recent surveys by the Association of State Dam Safety Officials and the Association of State Floodplain Managers found that only 10 states keep any listing of levees within their borders and only 23 states have an agency with some responsibility for levee safety. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates that levees are found in approximately 22% of the nation’s 3,147 counties. Forty-three percent of the U.S. population lives in counties with levees. Many of those levees were designed decades ago to protect agricultural and rural areas, not the homes and businesses that are now located behind them.” InfrastructureReportcard.org.
Conservative estimates tell us that we have north of $2 trillion of repairs to our nation’s infrastructure, a number that will certainly rise the longer we wait to fix the problem. Then again, we could multiply that number by allowing infrastructure failure with floods, droughts, crushed bones and lost productivity time as trucks and cars snarl on outdated roads trying to move workers, goods and services efficiently across the land. Or we could actually improve our economic outlook, invest (vs just “spend”) in America and help reduce that 8.2% unemployment rate and get to work.
I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time politicians focused more on preventing problems before they arise rather than taking the expensive route and dealing with the death and destruction after the disaster occurs.
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