AlterNet: We've Got to Rebuild America's Crumbling Infrastructure

We've Got to Rebuild America's Crumbling Infrastructure

By Joanna Guldi, AlterNet. Posted August 16, 2008.

"The nation's skeleton is as fragile as the candy-cane bones sucked down to threads on Cinco de Mayo."



Early this summer most of America saw images of houses washing down the swollen Mississippi, logjammed against a bridge. In the following weeks we heard about the humans, libraries and even pets left homeless, but outside Iowa, few people heard about the problem of those houses, or indeed about that bridge itself. Iowans alone were left to contemplate their opportunities: When insurance failed, would FEMA provide? Would charity? Such questions only rise in importance the moment a reader in San Francisco or New Orleans or Miami pauses to consider who would repair their own city after disaster. For those who pay attention, the problem is wider still. Relics of the early 20th century, America's ancient dams and highways are crumbling with a shocking rapidity. The nation's skeleton is as fragile as the candy-cane bones sucked down to threads on Cinco de Mayo. Who replaces highways and bridges once they're gone?

Most Americans alive today grew up in an era when state infrastructure was on the rise. Some can remember still the monumental Mississippi flood of 1927, which propelled the nation into an unprecedented glut of levee-building. In 1944, the Pick-Sloan Plan gave the Army Corps of Engineers control over 316 reservoirs, dams, navigation projects and flood control zones across the nation. Seventy-year-olds still remember glowing documentaries boasting the efforts' star initiatives: the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification. In the 1950s and '60s, state engineers spread pylons and arches and overpasses across the nation. They connected and canalized; they filled the landscape with the rumbling sound of commerce on highways, rivers, ports and streets.

That phase of building was associated with a 200-year trend in politics, in which infrastructure became the favorite experiment of expanding nations. By the 18th century, modern democracies had learned that they could extract more resources from their hinterlands if they improved the means of communication, trade and production in the form of infrastructure. State road-building projects transformed Great Britain and France. Prussia used river navigation and marsh drainage. Statecraft carved farms out of marshes and ports from lonely rocks; it threw highways across the nation. Those highways, ports and dams continue to depend upon the action of the state. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/95268/we%27ve_got_to_rebuild_america%27s_crumbling_infrastructure/

:kick:

in large part to maintaining their infrastructure. Holding on to far-flung territories with their cities, towns, forts, roads, walls, etc... certainly fits the bill.

What seems to escalate the process of failure is the construction of monuments - vanity masquerading as infrastructure. Our great bridges would fit the bill except that they also enable vital transport of goods. People, not so much. The energy use of city dwellers is - not unusually - a fraction of their counterparts in the suburbs.

A new model, based on the old model (NYC, London, Paris, Alexandria) is an answer to a lot of our problems.

Just sayin'.

Unintended consequences are a BITCH!
In some areas, the massive building of levees have made things worse. The disappearance of the Louisiana wetlands are a direct consequence of channeling the lower Mississippi River.

We DO need to direct resources away from attempting to DOMINATE the planet and supporting Worldwide Corporate Imperialism.
Those resources need to be applied to SMARTER infrastructure.

1)Immediate massive 10 year program for Alternative Sustainable Energy.

2)Immediate massive 10 year program to build a nationwide High Speed Rail system.

3)Rebuilding urban centers to an affordable, safe Green standard, and ploughing under the suburbs for biomass fuel and local (low transportation & preservation costs) food crops.

Very little needs to be spent upgrading or expanding our highway systems.
They are already obsolete.
River and Rail transportation are over 100X more efficient.