A few days ago, the Pin Oak Levee, near Winfield, MO, broke. The cause this time? Not a hurricane, sabotage, or terrorism; it was muskrats. Yes, you read correctly; a combination of rising river water and restless rodents. Not for nothing do they say that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce.
To the Pin Oak collapse, add another 35 or so levee breaks in the last couple of weeks, the collapse of a bridge in Taney County, MO, and another collapse-in-progress in Livingston, MT that could be the I-35 disaster writ small. That’s to say nothing of highways and bridges in much of the country that can’t handle the traffic that travels them on a day-to-day basis, or sewer systems in many municipalities whose turn-of-the-[last] century designs aren’t up to servicing a 21st century populace. It’s becoming clear (if it hadn’t been already) that something is seriously wrong with our infrastructure.
So what gives? Given that the Republican party in general (since around 1980) and the present administration in particular seem eager to roll back as many vestiges of the New Deal as possible, one could be forgiven for wondering whether our highways, bridges, sewage systems, and other critical infrastructure are being deliberately neglected. A look at the longer term, though, shows this to be short-sighted.
After all, it was President Eisenhower who gave America one of the biggest public works projects since the WPA, arguing that our transportation capacity was a matter of national security. Democratic administrations and local politicians haven’t done much better by the country or their constituents in the years since, either.
There are two broader problems in play here. The first is that public works just aren’t sexy. It’s likely a safe bet that the chattering class in the media won’t bring much attention to this except as an afterthought in the aftermath a large-scale disaster like Katrina or the aforementioned I-35 bridge collapse, in favor of the usual horse race angle of election year politics, and more back-and-forth over social wedge issues. It’s an even safer bet that MTV will never run “Pimp My Infrastructure.”
Politicians, in turn, get the photo opportunities and votes over the new projects they bring to their states and districts, which usually means a ribbon cutting on a new factory or marmoset museum. Spending billions on a new project, even a wasteful one, ends up taking precedence over the less attention-getting, but decidedly more vital, task of retrofitting what we’ve got already; it seems as though some prefer the cost of a massive cleanup, post-disaster, to the “too expensive” cost of repairing something correctly before disaster strikes.
Then there’s the pork issue. Pork spending has become such a target–even if only by way of lip service and association–that even legitimate projects get put under the microscope. All it takes is one bridge or one highway to nowhere to ruin it for everyone else.
But it’s clear that something needs to be done; the examples listed above are, I think, a fair indication of that. We are, increasingly, a superpower with third-world infrastructure. Moreover, and more often, the cost of its failure isn’t measured solely in dollars, but in human lives.