- Last week's blackout in the Northeast gave everybody
a quickie lesson in the importance of the electric grid and what happens
when it malfunctions.
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- But the grid is only one of several parts that make up
the infrastructure of this country ó the foundation that allows
it to keep running.
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- Things like bridges, roads, sewer and water systems,
telecommunications, etc. And if you thought the electric grid was in bad
shape, what till you get a load of the rest.
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- Take Atlanta's water system ó please! Its pipes
tend to rupture on average about once a day. And after a good rain, the
city's sewer system is in danger of overflowing and often spills raw waste
into the Chattahoochee River.
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- It's gotten so bad that Shirley Franklin, Atlanta's mayor,
is calling herself the "sewer mayor."
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- "It's a crisis," she said.
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- ëSeriously Be Concernedí
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- But Atlanta is not alone.
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- "We should very seriously be concerned," said
William Henry, incoming president-elect of the American Society of Civil
Engineers. "We are getting indicators of failures in all of our infrastructure
systems."
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- The ASCE says a third of the nation's highways are in
poor or mediocre condition.
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- The American Public Works Association rates 30 percent
of the nation's bridges "structurally deficient or functionally obsolete."
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- Some water pipes in big cities like Atlanta are 100 years
old and natural gas lines almost as ancient.
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- "The United States' infrastructure simply isn't
up to snuff," said David Schulz of Northwestern University.
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- Schulz says much of the problem involves funding. Money
for maintenance, he says, is increasingly hard to come by.
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- "It's been squeezed out of the budget, really, across
the country for a long time. And we've got a big backlog of investment
that we've got to make up," he told ABCNEWS.
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- Big Backlog of Investment?
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- It's estimated that it would cost more than $1 trillion
over five years to fix everything that needs fixing. Good luck on getting
more than $1 trillion from Congress and an administration that wants to
cut spending and taxes.
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- But something clearly has to be done.
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- Chicago offers another almost preposterous example of
the problems facing the country's infrastructure.
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- Thirty percent of the nation's freight-train traffic
must pass through Chicago, and any major delays can have a big, negative
impact on the U.S. economy as a whole. Yet the system is dependent on antiquated
technology.
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- There's a small shack along the tracks on the southwest
side of the city that houses one worker and a number of long levers. It
is this person's job to pull the levers manually when he wants to raise
a metal signal flag to oncoming trains, telling them to either stop or
go.
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- Miguel D'Escoto, the city's transportation commissioner,
says that kind of thing has got to stop. The system has to be modernized,
D'Escoto says. He hopes funds can be raised from the city, state and private
companies to fund a $1.5 billion renovation plan that includes automating
that little shack on the southwest side.
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- After all, says D'Escoto, the procedure is the same as
the one that was in place in 1870 ó when Ulysses S. Grant was president.
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- Copyright © 2002 ABC News Internet Ventures.
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- http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/US/infrastructure030820.html
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