Our Nation's Infrastructure At Risk

without a 250 million dollar fix we're facing a total closure of the bridge we are living on the infrastructure built by our great grandparents and great-great grandparents we're gonna have a D and then a D - and then failure hello I'm Bonnie Erbe a welcome to a documentary edition of to the contrary say the word infrastructure and let's face it most people's eyes glaze over but infrastructure if you think about it our roads our dams our bridges our trains our electrical supply our water supply it's all the foundation of a robust economy and if you think even more infrastructure determines our quality of life a solid infrastructure provides jobs allows domestic trade as well as delivery and export of foreign goods helping us to compete in a global economy infrastructure also keeps our communities connected and safe with water and sewer services and storm protection routes providing us with an enviable lifestyle arguably the best in the world but over the years are spending on maintenance has gone down and our use of infrastructure has gone up leaving it crumbling and in critical condition the help demand economy the health of the environment all these things depend on keeping infrastructure up-to-date I mean this country's economy was built on infrastructure from the earliest days of the uri canal to the interstate highway system all these things are the bedrock foundation of our economy the question is do we as a country invest in our infrastructure in order to maintain that infrastructure where it needs to be and that answer is no the American Society of Civil Engineers or ASCE releases a report every four years that grades 16 categories of our nation's infrastructure they are evaluated on the basis of capacity condition funding future need operation and maintenance public safety resilience and innovation most of the grades on the civil engineers report card aren't even passive for example the nation's railroads received one of the better grades C+ roads and water systems received a D meaning poor the overall grade the 2013 report card the overall grades D plus what are the grades mean for personal safety and quality of life let's look at bridges ASCE gave our bridges a C+ a bit better than mediocre Maryland lawyer Steven Jensen mer explains the impact that type of grade can have on an unwitting user back in February 2015 my client was driving on Siouxland Parkway which is a highway in Prince George's County Maryland right outside Washington DC as she was approaching the overpass for the Beltway which is a major artery that goes around the District of Columbia several large pieces of concrete which it I guess come loose over years fell from the bridge overpass and landed on her car starting at the hood working its way through the windshield the roof and even under the trunk we estimated between seven and nine pieces had fallen sizes of about about that large his client wasn't seriously hurt but she says she's terrified of driving under and over bridges now when the incident happened there were a total of 81 bridges that the state was responsible for overseeing that had been deemed structurally deficient and this bridge where it happened was one of those 81 this isn't an isolated case according to a SCE the average age of the nation's more than 6,000 bridges is 42 years one in nine bridges is rated as structurally deficient and during the last two decades nearly six hundred bridges have failed two of the deadliest accidents in 2002 a 500 foot section of a bridge spanning the Arkansas River in Weber's Falls Oklahoma collapsed after a barge ran into one of its supports 14 people died and in Minneapolis in 2007 the central span of the i-35 West bridge collapsed during rush hour as on this surveillance camera it left at least four people dead and many more missing even the iconic 1930s Memorial Bridge the symbolic entrance to Washington DC and the symbol of unification between the north and south following the Civil War is crumbling this historic bridge connects the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House the robert e lee memorial Arlington Memorial Bridge is in need of a two hundred and fifty million dollar overhaul and that is almost entirely of the National Park Service transportation funds for all 410 national parks across the country without a 250 million dollar fix by 2021 we're facing a total closure of the bridge that's a difficult decision to make but it's most important to keep people safe according to the National Park Service closing comes at a cost Arlington Memorial Bridge is used by about 70,000 people a day and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments calculated the traffic delay costs from a closure of Arlington Memorial Bridge in 2021 the traffic delay alone would cost the district seventy four point five million dollars a year other roads and bridges overseen by the National Park Service are also in need of repair those repairs have been deferred due to the fact they would cost an estimated twelve billion dollars and there's no budget for it the laborers International Union of North America is so concerned about bridges it started a wake-up call we call it the get schemed on infrastructure too it's quote getting schooled on infrastructure end quote campaign includes billboards radio ads and a nationwide tour of a school bus with a section of a bridge smashed on its roof none of us want to see that happen Richmond John Yarmuth is using this smashed up bus to prove a point today the congressman was in Louisville urging Congress to pass the highway bill well right now Congress is fiddling while our nation collapses what will it take to fix our bridges the Federal Highway Administration estimates another huge number some twenty point five billion dollars a year to eliminate the nation's bridge deficient backlog in 12 years just less than thirteen billion dollars was approved by Congress for repairs now ongoing but funding and fixing our bridges isn't the country's only major infrastructure problem the nation's roads are also deteriorating they rated addy most were built 60 years ago under the 1956 Federal Highway Act and were never intended for as many cars as used them now however the solution to all the problems lies most of all in public understanding for only when each citizen becomes better informed about his state's highway program can the nation meet the highway challenge so the better safer roads of tomorrow will become the roads of today if you go back to the birth of the interstate highway system in the 1950s I in the 1950 census the American population was a hundred and sixty one million people and of course when they started building those highways in the 50s they projected in a certain fairly robust population increase but they weren't imagining a doubling of the US population in such a short amount of time according to the Census Bureau the US population at 319 million two years ago or so is supposed to rise to 417 million Americans by the Year 2060 that's almost 100 million more people in this country the vast majority will have been born overseas or will be the children of those who were born overseas and u.s. population growth is one factor among several accounting for the deterioration of our infrastructure system I would say our population is growing too rapidly immigration has a huge impact on u.s. infrastructure primarily through driving rapid population growth the more people we have obviously the more roads the more bridges doesn't mean that immigrants are bad people it just means that you can have too many people and I think we've reached that point right now that point can be seen in commuting time and the stress that goes along with it dan Festa wanted his children to grow up in a small town atmosphere but he didn't want to give up his restaurant managers job in the heart of Washington DC so for 16 years he's been driving 100 miles each way door-to-door on one of the most congested roads in America I 66 when I first started doing the commute it was about an hour and 25 minutes now it's up to about two hours give or take you know depending on the time of day I leave if I leave earlier it can be up to three to three and a half hours if I'm in the heart of rush hour if I leave at five o'clock at night it could take me three and a half hours to four hours to get home during snowstorms it's even worse that my worst commute has been 7 hours to get home that commuting time chips away at his quality of life four hours a day of commuting I lose a lot of personal family time and a lot of work time I do do accomplish a lot on the phone but there is a lot that I don't do because I'm not I'm not in the restaurant according to the 2015 urban mobility scorecard on average nationwide commuters lost six point nine billion hours of productivity while stuck in traffic at the same time they created huge amounts of co2 emissions commuters lost more than three billion gallons of fuel to traffic delays in 2014 and created all the pollution that goes along with that wasted fossil fuel if your community is growing then that two-lane highway isn't sufficient so maybe it's in fairly decent condition but it's no longer the serving the population the way that it needs to be served to avoid the overcrowded roads many commuters use mass transit but according to the ASCE the transit sector isn't doing its job it was graded d the reason forty five percent of American households lack access to transit entirely millions of others have inadequate service plagued by safety problems compounded by aging equipment that needs to be replaced Boston launched the nation's first mass transit system in 1897 this was the beginning of what is now known as the T line the nation's oldest system now has a three billion dollar maintenance backlog and spends almost five hundred million dollars each year just to keep the rail lines from deteriorating further the city's 2016 budget contained less than 100 million dollars for maintenance New York City Subway is the country's busiest system with almost 5.7 million riders daily up by about a half million daily riders in five years it's more than a hundred years old although Washington DC's Metro the second busiest public transit system is only 40 years old it has suffered a series of casualties when infrastructure failed in 2009 two trains collided when the system's automatic control system failed nine people died and more than 70 were injured multiple fires on the tracks have closed the system repeatedly a 2015 fire on the tracks left people stranded in a smoke-filled car killing one person and injuring dozens of others does metros problem and a lot of the issues of face reflects the larger state of the country's infrastructure especially transportation infrastructure are you are we essentially an example of what's going wrong right now when it comes to transportation funding and I think yeah a lot of the same trends that you see across the country whether it's transit I mean you name it you look at any of the the industry groups and they have they have a laundry list of needs that have been met have been sort of kicked down the road and at some point they come you know come to it to come back to haunt us those needs did come back to haunt Metro for the first time in its history nine days later DC Metro shut down its entire system for 24 hours that left its 700,000 daily commuters looking for alternative transportation hundreds of thousands stayed home including federal workers who were given liberal leave since we began at midnight Metro teams have have identified 26 errors were damaged jumper cables and connector bus exists if you could take a look at this map behind me as a 5:00 p.m. we found 26 defected areas we've completed 19 of the zones we got three more to do the red marks are what we have internally called showstoppers where we would not be running trains if we if we came upon these conditions the number of Americans relying on passenger trains is rising according to the ASCE both freight and passenger train companies do invest in tracks bridges and tunnels but this sector still received a C+ because maintenance budgets aren't large enough to make the whole system sound in May 2015 a train accident in Philadelphia killed eight people and sent hundreds to the hospital the Train was taking a curve with a speed limit of 50 miles an hour at 106 miles an hour the cause of the accident was never determined the National Transportation Safety Board has ruled out issues with the locomotive track or train signals investigators were looking into possible human error the accident might have been prevented if the train had positive train control that's an advanced technology designed to automatically stop trains Congress mandated all railroads install it by the end of 2015 but due to its cost many railroads have yet to comply the NTSB said without it everybody on a train is one human error away from an accident other infrastructure systems are also atrophying the ASE reports America is relying on a set of aging pipeline and electrical grid distribution systems some of which date back to the 1880s that's why this sector received a d+ according to the report americans are experiencing an increasing number of intermittent power disruptions and are more vulnerable to cyberattacks the engineer's report notes although demand for electricity is level the availability of energy in the form of electricity natural gas and oil will become a greater challenge after 2020 as the population increases what frightens me to be honest is that it's a slow steady decay so when you have a brownout in your young person and it happens once and then a couple years later it happens and then a couple months later it happens it's slow and steady but if you ask that young person's parents we never had those so it's a slow and steady decay damage to our roads and bridges can actually be seen or felt as we have described earlier but less so with the country's more than eighty four thousand dams they provide water for drinking irrigation and hydropower dams were issued a D by the civil engineers the reason more than 28 thousand dams about one-third of all dams in the US are already more than 50 years old and that's the standard intended lifespan many of these dams were also built as low hazard dams protecting undeveloped agricultural land the increasing US population has led to greater development below dams so the overall number of high hazard dams meaning they're at risk of some sort of failure and causing loss of life continues to rise the association of dam safety officials estimates it would cost 21 billion dollars to repair these aging yet critical high hazard dams but the federal government owns and regulates only some 4 percent of the nation's dams the others are owned mainly by States many states are still experiencing deficits as a result of the recession so experts say it's highly unlikely they will find the money for maintenance and what is the estimated cost to fix the nation's infrastructure problems it's about three point six trillion dollars by 2020 that we need to invest in order to get our grades up in all 16 centers part of that three point six trillion is there already but there's a gap so a little less than half we don't have funding for right now Congress approved some money in 2015 and President Obama signed into law a five-year three hundred five billion dollar highway bill for transit programs this will be the biggest jobs bill passed by this Congress there's no way we can do more for the American economy than making these long-term investments putting hundreds of thousands of people to work rebuilding our critical infrastructure it also doesn't just go to construction design engineering and small business as do highway contracts that also has a major investment in transit the fixing America's surface transportation or fast act has money in it to improve roadway safety streamline the environmental review and permitting process and enhance the level of private sector investment in surface transportation projects it also dedicates 1.5 billion dollars toward improvements in the nation's Freight program to boost US economic competitiveness another reason our infrastructure is in dire straits is politically it's almost impossible to rally voters around such a broad concept former Vice President Al Gore tried to make climate change and the environment an issue in his losing 2000 presidential bid in this election the environment itself is on the ballot and there's a big difference between us I'll never put polluters in charge of our environmental laws he talked about improving or adding roads to reduce sprawl and ending pollution to improve the environment and the quality of life in the 2016 presidential campaign infrastructure improvement was in all the major candidates platforms on the Democratic side Hillary Clinton pledged to boost federal investment by two hundred seventy five billion dollars over the next five years Bernie Sanders introduced the rebuild America Act of 2015 that would have invested a trillion dollars over the next five years toward rebuilding and expanding on infrastructure on the Republican side Donald Trump said if he were in the White House he would fix the country's aging infrastructure system and it would be done on time on budget and way below cost John Kasich focused on transportation he would direct policy Authority funding and responsibilities to the states Ted Cruz's solution was to abolish cumbersome regulations he said government needs to get out of the way so people could do what they do best innovate expand and create new jobs getting away from the national political realm some say the solution lies in partnerships between government entities private firms financiers and philanthropies some experts say those sectors should come together to bolster our infrastructure Maryland pursued this approach for a 16 mile extension of mass transit called the Purple Line estimates are that it will serve 69 thousand daily riders in 2030 I've always said that this decision was never about whether public transit was worthwhile but whether it is affordable and makes economic sense under our more efficient and more cost-effective version of the Purple Line the state share of the project will be 168 million dollars a fraction of the original proposal which it would have cost the state close to 700 million but critics say building more roads and adding infrastructure isn't the solution because it leads to massive sprawl and over development lowering the quality of life I think it's time for Americans to really ask ourselves what is the endgame with all this I mean do we want to pave the whole country so that we're we're stuck in traffic wherever we go it's time for us to say we've filled up the continent and we've got plenty of people we don't have to double our population in the next 70 or 80 years with all the further demands for more taxation and infrastructure that would come with that let's get a handle on on our infrastructure needs now instead of just adding even more to them through immigration driven population growth Philip Howard founded common good an organization dedicated to the idea that government should held accountable for its actions he has a very different view of why our infrastructure is in bad shape there may be communities that are that are near say the southern border where there are many illegal immigrants and that have created a housing crisis and maybe even traffic jams but by and large the congestion on the roads and congestion on the rails and the powerlines and such it's just inconceivable to me that that those issues have anything to do with the marginal increase in the number of immigrants Howard instead blames the age of the infrastructure we are living on the infrastructure or built by our great grandparents and great-great grandparents he also blames red tape it's not a question of the finances or even the environmental issues it really is fundamentally a question of no one having the ability to say go we've just created a system where where to get a permit for any major infrastructure project you're not going to the government you're going to 30 different governments because the Fish and Wildlife Department considers itself the keeper of the flame and the Corps of Engineers help you for the flame and Fire Department decision and they are all sort of the keeper of the flame but their rules can't even be reconciled sometimes whatever the solution commuters such as dan Festa would like improvement sooner rather than later years ago by 10 o'clock you'd have to hide with yourself now as you can see it's 11 o'clock and we are still in slowing traffic we're doing 40 miles an hour and there's cars everywhere if I had the extra four hours a day I could spend more time at home with the family if I had all the time if I spend roughly 20 40 hour work weeks a year in the car

Channel: To the Contrary on PBS

Views: 22,014

Keywords:

Id: Qz95qrKc3n8

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2016