Inframaintenance
Structures require maintenance.
You change the oil and sparkplugs in your car. The filters for the house air conditioner and furnace get replaced periodically and you paint the siding now and again.
But, when it comes to this kind of work on big stuff, "out of sight, out of mind" prevails over "pay me now or pay me later."
It's been pay me later time for a couple of decades now for our public utilities.
I've lived in Atlanta for the last twenty years. I used to work in the heart of downtown and parked in the "pigeon pit," which is an area where the streets years and years ago were built up above ground level so the railroad tracks didn't interfere with street traffic. Even back then, the concrete structures were falling apart. Chunks of concrete had fallen out, exposing the rebar in the piers. Our solution? String metal "netting" under and around the concrete so people and cars didn't get hit by the falling debris.
Starting a few years back, a couple of decades late, Atlanta started spending a couple of billion dollars to save our water system.
This morning's paper reported that there are 18 bridges in Metro Atlanta that score under 10 on the 1 to 100 structural integrity scale the feds use in inspecting bridges. The paper reported earlier in the week that Georgia DOT spends about $100 billion a year maintaining bridges but that to bring bridges up to proper maintenance levels would take more than a billion dollars.
When and if we pull out of Iraq maybe the money can be spent on some of the more critical inframaintenance we should have been doing. Probably not. In six months, our bridges and water and sewer pipes will be back out of public sight and out of our public mind.
4 comments:
I have to go across the Mississippi River crossing Arkansas to Tennessee...I've thought about that since the bridge collapse. I think that's very selfish of me. We have at last count 5 dead and 8 missing plus many injured...(thank God that school bus didn't have casualties).
But I thought that was pretty selfish of me to have this in my mind and I'll have it in my mind when I make that cross on Tuesday.
Now...about my Force of Nature? Do NOT give her ideas...okay? She calls me on the carpet plenty without help.
Hi Everybody!!:)
Now would that be a red carpet, Monica, a blanket of fair-weather sky, or astro-turf?
Some people have thought that now, in the age of effective mass communications, democracy could come much closer to a "direct" mode than a "representative" mode. I would support that notion.
Our representatives are clearly not focusing on the "big issues", infrastructure being one of them. It seems that they are much more concerned with political topics than with the needs of those they supposedly represent.
There's a finite amount in the national budget. It would be nice if people had more of a voice in how that money was distributed. We might be surprised if we asked them!
It all boils down to statistics and percentages, I'd say. They speak louder than any words can. They tell us where the interest lies, and where expenditures remain.
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