Last week, coinciding with the anniversary of the collapse of
the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, many news articles appeared reassessing how far
we’ve come (the consensus seems to be not far enough) in inspecting similar
bridges around the country.
This brings up once again the
larger question of the state of the infrastructure in general—the whole network
of roads and bridges and other transportation systems, power grids,
waste-handling facilities, dams, and so on. The American Society of Civil
Engineers periodically issues the Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,
grading us in 15 different categories (see it online at www.asce.org/reportcard). The most
recent one, in 2005, gave us an overall grade of D and estimated the cost to fix
problems over the next five years at $1.6 trillion. Stormwater isn’t one of the
15 categories (drinking water and wastewater are), but we, too, have our
infrastructure problems, such as aging pipes, undersized storm sewer systems,
and combined sewer overflows.
As we’re seeing with the reports
of bridge inspections, part of the problem in assessing the infrastructure lies
in not even knowing what’s out there. Federal officials trying to count—let
alone inspect—the nation’s steel deck truss bridges like the one in Minneapolis
found they didn’t have a complete list, and also that some bridges on the list
no longer existed or were of a different type than they’d previously thought.
The situation is even more
complicated for water systems, most of which, of course, are underground. Some
communities trying to comply with NPDES permits have inventoried and mapped
their entire stormwater infrastructure using geographic information systems.
Others haven’t even begun.
Few single events related to the
water infrastructure (not counting the failure of a dam or levee) could compare,
in terms of damage and loss of life, with the collapse of a bridge. And most
stormwater systems are the concern of local, not federal, jurisdictions. But
knowing what’s there and what condition it’s in is a first step to prioritizing
maintenance activities and budgeting for repairs and upgrades.
How is your community doing in assessing (or in finding) its problem
areas?