America's Infrastructure Is Crumbling

[Music] everybody's talking at me I don't care what saying only their goals of my [Music] pious Thomas rush hour at Penn Station New York's busiest and at least aesthetically appealing railway Center and trains I take pass through here along the trains of half a million others everyday which is connected to New York and rest of the Northeast by one little tunnel built in 1910 and drastic need of repair just like the rest of America structure one Amtrak's North River tunnel has two tracks the only rail lines under the Hudson connecting New York City to the rest of the country this bottleneck that's even worse at winter when ice forms in cracks left by Hurricane sandy and 100 years of general wear and tear forcing Amtrak to periodically shut down the tunnels and defrost their catenary electrical lines when as you look around a wire usually this bicycles which we say if we stop them do not get that this icicle here could trip out the catenary to knock the wire down and train to come in then you have 600 people here straighter and you got no power people freeze it on a trade route we keep up with the ice so what would happen if we don't it'll happen a lot what happens call the PD right now hey did you lose the South tube now okay we're almost done in here blot ice ice scraping and other emergency maintenance keeps the North River tunnel in service at least for now but it's a band-aid solution to the complete overhaul the tunnel needs to make it through its second century intact this thing needs to be rebuilt essentially from the inside out so the idea here is to build a new tunnel shift all the traffic into the new tunnel so that we can then come back and rebuild these so that would all set down you have four tracks under the Hudson a four track Hudson rail line is one of the goals of the Gateway program while the new tunnel is still waiting for full funding the old one puts as much as 20% of the entire country's GDP in jeopardy every time it has to be closed which is frequently chaos and confusion at Penn Station last night brands and problems at Penn Station again the North River tunnel needs federal money to help cover its estimated thirteen billion dollar price tag a number that goes up by over 1 million dollars every day they put off digging fortunately the guy we elected president made a big deal out of allocating big money to big infrastructure projects just like this one we need to pass a 1 trillion dollar infrastructure plan to build new roads and bridges and airports and tunnels and highways and railways all across our great nation turning that big promise into an actual plan was delegated to businessman and former member of the us-china congressional Commission Dan slain slain produced a list of 50 infrastructure projects for the Trump transition team to consider prioritized by their urgency and national importance my plan was to search out the most critical projects that we could start with then define how many jobs would be created by those what the economic development benefit was so that I could go up to Congress give them the estimates and then the following year go back and give them the actual numbers that was the plan why did the approach you for infrastructure plan because I knew a lot about China I study what China did when their economy would start to dip they switched over to structured they started building railroads hospitals power stations all over Eastern China billions of dollars that they poured into their country and then when the economy picked up again they stopped and I saw the power of of infrastructure our economy for the last ten years has been stagnating there's only two ways to grow your economy you increase employment or your increased productivity infrastructure does both unlike China however the United States hasn't tapped into the full economy saving power of infrastructure since the middle of the last century both in terms of building new stuff and keeping the old stuff in working order and it shows now we just suspected this bridge last year there you can see the extent of the deterioration see the hole that's the call to floor beam at actually is a fracture critical member fracture critical means and if one member fails the bridge can fail okay there's a hole on these you know very much ever floor beam all the way through here's the dates on these nuts just when they were noticed or that's how we keep track of it every time when we come back the next time we look at that writing and decide whether or not that hole has actually grown or not and it has this bridge undergone any like nature innovations this thing was built nineteen forty something everything is done this bridge from now on will be a band-aid it's a nice kind of like throwing money into a car yeah exactly throwing money into a twenty year old car the National Bridge inventory has a zero to nine scale and this bridge is rated to four which puts it in deficient category we will close it when it gets lower than a three they were to lower the weight limit or close the bridge where would be the nearest crossing it's the only one but then a hundred miles or so either direction how much time would that add to a trip I'm guessing probably four hours to their time multiply those four hours by just the six trucks we've seen crossing the bridge in the 20 minutes we've been here and you've already got one full 24 hour day worth a lost time and wasted gas then multiply that by the rest of the trucks on this route every day and multiply that by the number of bridges and similar shapes statewide and finally multiply all that by 50 states and 365 days a year and you see how the American trucking industry claims to lose some 60 billion dollars annually just allows the infrastructure but a big old chunk of American shipping is still done by exactly that shipping though its initial engineering was done by Mother Nature the man-made infrastructure on our country's waterways this is old and dilapidated as it's terrestrial counterparts the Army Corps of Engineers operates a network of locks and dams that allow cargo boats barges and pleasure craft alike to navigate the country's rivers both upstream and downstream from one elevation to another this is Locks and Dam 52 on the Ohio River this is America's single busiest lot it's coming up on its 90th birthday that's very old and things do break and closures do happen when they do with it costs our economy some billion dollars every year I went to this jobs was kind of like waiting around on something to happen I don't know some I was waiting it's the army it's hurry up a way but the river dictates his job we arrived at Locsin damn 52 smack in the middle of another closure which by this point has become routine a leak in the busiest lock and dam on the Ohio River and once again river traffic is at a halt at 52 now usually the water would be up to the top of the wicket when we get it all the way closed off but last night we're trying to raise the dam all the way to the pier we got a hold of a wicket and it came up sideways we let go of it washed over a couple other wickets and went down river so we lost that one so we're gonna regroup we don't know exactly what shape it's in until we dive on it and pull them out it's 1927 dams so at any time we can have a catastrophic failure we're just gonna cost more money it's a budget nightmare I'm sure kind of falling apart but the whole point of locks and dams system is to prevent the river water from becoming too shallow for a boat to pass through it while many of the 100-year old parts still work fine like this vintage jazz era steam engine the parts that don't can cause some serious headaches not just for the lock tenders but for all the boats upriver all those are those tow boats damn how we use them a lot for several miles as normal yes not once bad traffic way it was 50 wait I hope they've got some good books closures the 52 have last as long as 18 days and the consequent boat jams aren't just irritating they're also expensive even having one boat wait here for 15 hours has been estimated to cost its company $80,000 we just have a lot of traffic here but this is busiest lock in the United States it's busier than a Panama Canal everything's coming through here this is America's economy log 52 is supposed to be replaced with the state of the art dam back in the 90s but it's still under construction and this is just one out of a whole network of locks and dams on one River the Army Corps of Engineers estimates that it needs a minimum of five billion dollars worth of repairs to keep the entire Inland Waterways system navigable over the next 20 years and for corn farmers like Paul Jesse and the rest of our agricultural heartland slash breadbasket there isn't really an alternative these elevators are it's right in the best place you can possibly beeps have the cheapest transportation for export that is why we're so incredibly worried about the locks and dams going down who absorbs the cost of that that either has to be paid for by us getting a lower price for our grain for paying more for the other inputs that we buy the only source of that money in my opinion ultimately is Department even when the waterways older infrastructure is working the scale at wood shipping technology and output have grown in the last hundred years this far outstripped some of its capabilities robots pass through lock 21 with a tow boat pushing 150 foot barges these young men I'll do is break off nine from the 15 push those through and then the boat will push the other six turn rejoin until the next log most of the United States locks and dams aren't big enough for a larger barge toes to pass through all together so they have to be split up and reassembled at every lock along their route so now the bus and a lock the deckhands are going to break apart the two sections of barge I don't guising how low-tech it is the guy on top of the line it's called a mule because that job used to be done by mules no disrespect but I just felt like they could give them a better title at this point a slow going as the waterways can get there still far and away the most efficient and really the only sustainable way of shipping cargo at this scale if this were all to be shipped by a train or trucks how many of us take with a 15 barge tonne loaded at nine foot it had to be 225 jumbo hopper cars on a train it's 870 semi trucks oh it's that'd be 11 and a half miles bumper to bumper to move what's in these barges that's crazy once the barges make it through all the locks and dams to the bottom of the river they still have one more piece of faulty infrastructure to contend with before their goods can be shipped abroad the port of South Louisiana also on dance lands infrastructural fix-it list [Music] this is the major export port for the United States when you think about 31 States most of them are shipping grain and agriculture down here it was unbelievable it's also pretty nice and France to sell it to us for so cheap right what's going on down here the major problem here is the silting at the mouth a place called Southwest Bears and the Corps doesn't have the resources to keep it open to a level of 50 feet draught that's the new ships coming through the Panama Canal so 2016 they have to lower the draft to 41 feet for every foot you lower you lose a million dollars of bargain when you multiply 7,000 ships a year the number is astronomical making us less competitive in the global environment the river becomes less viable to the ships that are being used you're gonna have less of that tax revenue because people are gonna make their ships elsewhere right it's just a downward spiral Slane was pumped to see the administration tackled this downward spiral until it became clear that his list of infrastructure priorities was not itself a priority when did you realize that the administration was kind of not taking her February of 2017 my list was shelved at that point their approach is to take most of the infrastructure dump it back on to the states and they know that the states don't have the funding the states are not gonna raise taxes and it's a way to coheres the states into using public-private partnerships having Wall Street finance infrastructure the conflict is Wall Street wants the maximum return on investment when you have an asset that is the public good you want the minimum return on investment so this is their plan and it's going nowhere and nothing will be built unfortunately the Trump plan is you up heard is a sham the president has said he wants to spend two hundred billion dollars I'm not quite sure where those dollars are coming from not gonna be part of this budget Kerry flimflamming you can pay for roads and bridges just out of thin air I could have started with infrastructure I actually wanted to save the easy one for the one down the road so we'll be having that done pretty quickly whether Trump intends to get to infrastructure quickly or down the road or if these words are somehow supposed to mean the same thing not having done it right out of the gate may have been a big oopsie I tried to convince them to come out of the box on January 20th to do infrastructure in my opinion is a single biggest mistake the president made and I think if he had done that he would have been invincible in November we're gonna get this infrastructure going 1.5 trillion dollar investment in American infrastructure we probably have to wait till after the election you you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 2,367,829

Rating: 4.8088779 out of 5

Keywords: america infrastructure, crumbling infrastructure, americas infrastructure documentary, us infrastructure, VICE on HBO, VICE News, VICE News Tonight, news, vice video, vice news 2019, the big fix, thomas morton, thomas morton vice news, infrastructure week, thomas morton vice, thomas morton vice on HBO, bridges, tunnels, america bridges, economy, MTA, nyc subway, public transportation, public transit new york, mta subway, Amtrak, Amtrak trains, subway construction, Donald trump

Id: EdvJSGc14xA

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TravelingThroughTime]

Civilizations have a life-cycle, much like a bridge or a dam. Modern industrial civilizations have an even shorter one.

[u/meet_me_somewhere]

Well if you sell off public assets to private enterprise this is what happens. All they care about is instant gratification, cash cash cash.

[u/[deleted]]

Hell yeah! USA! USA!

/s

[u/Bethereguy]

Germans infrastructure too.

And france, and Italy and, well everywhere.

Guess its a global thing..

[u/loco500]

I thought the US has been in a perpetually endless Infrastructure Week for the past 3 years.

[u/Truesnake]

The disconnect between people 's understanding of situation.One documentary says overconsumption is bad,another says how we need more consumption.

[u/Durka_Online]

Business doesn't want to pay tax, they said it was unfair. Ok. Here, you build the bridges then

[u/sambull]

Americas infrastructure woes in a single graph you can see when we could afford it and when our nation was THRIVING; and also when the giant monied interests took over our government (70s):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Top_Estate_Tax_Rate.png

[u/beachbbqlover]

Honestly, in another 500 years the US is going to be a beautiful place to walk around.

I wonder if anyone will be around to experience it.