America’s Falling Infrastructure

NEW YORK – Nearly five months after the BP ecological disaster, and exactly five years after Hurricane Katrina, the explosion of another platform comes to sow panic in the Gulf of Mexico. Although the cause of the explosion remains unclear, once again America deals with the fragility of its infrastructure. Its bridges, highways, power plants and railways are more akin to those of a developing country than to that of a strategic and economic superpower.

Yesterday’s accident was the latest of a long series of disasters defined by a well-known Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, Bob Herbert, as “more human than natural,” and according to him, “New Orleans was lost for want of an adequate system of levees and floodwalls.”

The latest emergency dates back to August 23, when a fire, which broke out near the Jamaica station, in the New York district of Queens, paralyzed more than 100,000 commuters from the Long Island Rail Road for four hours, and created severe hardships for the whole week for another 600,000 users of the major railway line in the United States.

The list is endless, beginning with the explosion of the power plant in Middletown, Connecticut, that last February resulted in five dead and 27 wounded, to the snow of December 2009 that caused blackouts in Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Delaware, with extensive damages in North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

One of the tragedies still alive in the memory of the country is the collapse of Bridge 9340 which connects the two banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis; on August 1, 2007, 13 people were killed while 145 others were seriously injured.

“America is falling apart,” writes James Follows in a long and very detailed article in The Atlantic, denouncing the disastrous infrastructure situation in the United States. “The American dams have an average age of 50 years, more than 26 percent of bridges in the country have structural deficiencies or are obsolete,” points out the journalist, “not to mention the aqueducts, where the losses reach 80 liters of water a day for each American.”

Lawrence Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council for Obama, was among the first to denounce this deterioration that began with the deregulation of the Reagan administration and continued with the cuts in public expenditure decreed by Bush Senior and Junior. “75 percent of America’s public schools have structural deficiencies,” says Summers, and “ports, inland waterways, drinking water and wastewater systems all have problems. To ignore them means endangering public safety and reducing economic competitiveness.”

President Obama answered the call when he announced that a substantial portion of the $900 billion stimulus package will be spent on restoration and modernization of the country’s infrastructure. “We have the great opportunity of creating new jobs on a large scale,” says Obama, who on the eve of the mid-term elections has to deal with the Republicans’ opposition to any kind of public investment.

The path for the Obama administration is an uphill struggle. Restructuring the bridges would cost $17 billion a year, more than double the funds currently allocated. And fixing the aqueducts would mean investing an additional $11 billion. “The truth is that America is losing the challenge,” Herbert writes. “China is building a network of 42 high-speed rail lines, while the U.S. has yet to build its first.”

Editor’s note: Quotations from Barack Obama and Lawrence Summers, properly translated, could not be verified.