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Minn. Bridge Collapse Reveals Brittle America: Expert
Op-Ed
Yesterday's tragedy makes it clear that the U.S. has been
squandering its infrastructure legacy by turning a reckless blind eye to
critical upgrades, says a national security expert, former Coast Guard officer
and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. (Click here for breaking news, forums and photos from PM
News!)

By Stephen Flynn
Published on: August 2, 2007

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KEYWORDS

bridges

transportation

Minnesota

It
will take time to determine why the Interstate 35 bridge collapsed, so
tragically, during the height of a Minneapolis rush hour on Wednesday night. But
investigators will likely find that two factors contributed to its failure: age
and heavy use. Bridge 9340 was constructed in 1967, 11 years after the launch of
the Eisenhower Interstate System. Until it plunged into the Mississippi River,
it served as a transportation lifeline for the growing Twin Cities population,
carrying across its 14 spans many of the SUVs, cars and trucks that accounted
for the 42 percent rise in Minnesota’s vehicle traffic from 1990 to 2003.

Age and heavy use are by no means isolated conditions. According to a
report card released in 2005 by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE),
160,570 bridges, or just over one-quarter of the nation’s 590,750-bridge
inventory, were rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. The
nation’s bridges are being called upon to serve a population that has grown from
200 million to over 300 million since the time the first vehicles rolled across
the I-35W bridge. Predictably that has translated into lots more cars. American
commuters now spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, at a
cost to the economy of $63.2 billion a year.

It is not just roads and
bridges that are being stressed to the breaking point. Two weeks ago New Yorkers
were scrambling for cover after a giant plume of 200-plus-degree steam and
debris shot out of the street and into the air. The mayhem was caused by the
explosion of a steam pipe, installed underground in 1924 to heat office
buildings near Grand Central station. In January 2007, Kentuckians and
Tennesseans woke up to the news that the water level of the largest man-made
reservoir east of the Mississippi would have to be dropped by 10 ft. as an
emergency measure. The Army Corps of Engineers feared that if it didn’t
immediately reduce the pressure on the 57-year-old Wolf Creek Dam, it might
fail, sending a wall of water downstream that would inundate communities all
along the Cumberland River, including downtown Nashville.

The fact is
that Americans have been squandering the infrastructure legacy bequeathed to us
by earlier generations. Like the spoiled offspring of well-off parents, we
behave as though we have no idea what is required to sustain the quality of our
daily lives. Our electricity comes to us via a decades-old system of power
generators, transformers and transmission lines—a system that has utility
executives holding their collective breath on every hot day in July and August.
We once had a transportation system that was the envy of the world. Now we are
better known for our congested highways, second-rate ports, third-rate passenger
trains and a primitive air traffic control system. Many of the great public
works projects of the 20th century—dams and canal locks, bridges and tunnels,
aquifers and aqueducts, and even the Eisenhower interstate highway system—are at
or beyond their designed life span.

In the end, investigators may find
that there are unique and extraordinary reasons why the I-35W bridge failed. But
the graphic images of buckled pavement, stranded vehicles, twisted girders and
heroic rescuers are a reminder that infrastructure cannot be taken for granted.
The blind eye that taxpayers and our elected officials have been turning to the
imperative of maintaining and upgrading the critical foundations that underpin
our lives is irrational and reckless.

America’s gross domestic product
in 2006 was $13.2 trillion—we can afford to have world-class infrastructure. As
a stepping-off point, we should insist that our elected representatives publicly
acknowledge the risk of neglecting the bridges, roads and other essential
hardware that goes into making a modern civilization. Then we should hold them
accountable for setting priorities and for marshaling the requisite resources to
repair our increasingly brittle society.

Stephen Flynn is a
senior fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations and author of The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation. He
was formerly director of the National Security Council’s Office of Global
Issues.

PM NEWS: Click here for breaking news updates, photos, more expert
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