Editorial: U.S. Infrastructure Is Approaching ‘Kaputness’

We don’t know if there is such a word as kaputness, but there should be. It’s what our infrastructure is moving toward. To be kaput means to lose functionality. In too many cases, we’re already there.

Take the I-35 bridge that collapsed at Minneapolis for example. Thirteen people died and another 145 were injured. The National Transportation Safety Board said the collapse was the result of a design flaw. Numerous steel plates were half the size they should have been. Perhaps our nightmare is just beginning. The federal government has labeled 72,000 bridges “structurally deficient” and another 80,000 as “functionally obsolete.”

Here’s the bottom line: construction attorney Barry B. LePatner, author and coauthor of numerous books and more than 500 articles on construction, says there are more than 12,000 bridges being used today whose designs are similar to that of the I-35 bridge.

“There are more than 100,000 more that need detailed inspections to ensure their safety…and there are no cheap or easy fixes,” he writes.

According to LePatner, bridge inspections and federal funds for repair are inadequate, and there is no surefire way to see that states receiving bridge repair funds spend them to repair bridges. The government allows $2 billion in maintenance costs annually for the 592,000 bridges that fall within its purview. That’s $3,500 per bridge.

Worse, LePatner says that during the 40 years since the I-35 bridge was built, no studies were undertaken to determine how much weight the span should be holding under today’s conditions. Not only was more and heavier traffic flowing over the bridge at the time of the collapse, but also heavy construction equipment was parked on it.

It is safe to say that neglect is not solely a problem with bridges. The Waterways Journal has discussed the topic of failing waterway infrastructure for decades. But even that limits our discussion too much. Highways are failing, and some traffic lanes are too narrow for oversized trucks. Airport traffic control is inadequate and growing more dangerous daily.

The problem is that infrastructure is failing all over the nation. Though our following illustration does not deal with navigation, it does deal with waterways and pollution. In one specific U.S. city we know of, the very day a new sewage disposal plant was put into operation, it was necessary to dump raw sewage into a nearby river during peak hours. What kind of forward-looking planning is that?

When locks and dams were first built in the U.S., few planners foresaw the transportation changes that have taken place over the many decades since. So we ended up having to replace inadequate locks. Passage of the Water Resources Development Act called for more of the same. Our highways are undergoing the same problems—too much traffic and vehicles that are larger and heavier. No one looked far enough ahead. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers keeps predicting increased transportation demands and, as is too often the case, the agency’s forecasts are ignored. Our “farsight” is too short.

A LePatner comment related directly to the I-35 bridge issue fits just about any modern infrastructure problem we can think of: “Today’s problems remain, despite decades of engineering analysis and reports that have highlighted the deteriorating nature of our infrastructure and the costs of remediation—now estimated to be in the hundreds of billions and increasing exponentially as every year passes.”

LePatner insists that there has to be a national dialogue about what we’re going to do about the huge and growing problem. Although no one is talking about it now, citizens have to demand that politicians take notice, he said. If we don’t start repairing our infrastructure in a financially responsible way, the next tragedy may be just around the corner.

We might conclude that our chickens are coming home to roost. As put in context by one online thesaurus, “bad or silly things done in the past are beginning to cause problems.” The problem with that analogy is that it is what we didn’t do that is getting us into trouble. And when honorable people tried to bring the problems to our attention, we too often ignored them.

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