04.10.08
Infrastructure Suffers From Years Of Neglect
The original article will probably be gone in a couple of weeks.
US water pipelines are breaking - Yahoo! News
Essentially, the article describes some major aqueducts that are reaching the end of their expected lives, either because of their age or because of lack of maintenance and repair.
This is actually an example of where short-term focus is harmful in the long run. One place I lived in this town, we had a water pipe that would break a couple of times each week during the Summer (breaks were discovered less frequently during colder weather). The company would come out and use a metal strap to provide a temporary patch. Then a few days later, the pipe would break somewhere else. In the local case, the pipe is only about four feet deep, so it isn’t infeasible to selectively replace the worst pipes in a desert.
It seems to be an America-wide thing, though. Lack of attention to infrastructure is costing us repair costs elsewhere (damage to homes and vehicles, traffic delays, emergency repairs, maybe even lost lives when some spectacular failure happens). We focus on the short-term instead of acting to prevent failure or to replace already-failing pipes and roads. We even neglect to build needed things like a region-wide high-speed rail system in Southern California, where some commuters travel up to 100 miles one-way to work. Or seeing that our current water imports are going to be reduced in the future (due to sharing Colorado River water and restrictions on other water supplies), we still fail to construct an ocean desalinization plant that can help make up the difference.
While we grumble about almost $4 per gallon fuel, we can’t do something that can help insulate us from the effects when fuel costs rise to $5, $6, $7, or even $10 per gallon? I don’t buy it. When I was spending five hours per day sitting in traffic, I was keenly interested in anything that would be faster and cheaper or even the same time and price but less frustrating.
A few years ago, when California was having its power crisis, our town leaders forbade a resident from putting up a windmill generator. The neighboring city decided to promote a power plant fueled by natural gas and cooled by the very water that is in short supply in the area.
This is nothing less than a failure of leadership. As a citizen, I know that I am not averse to higher taxes if they are spent wisely. Where I begin to put my foot down is when taxes rise, but there is no visible effect. Here in California, this must start in Sacramento and in city hall. There will be no improvement while things stay the same there. Local residents need to make it a big issue that their water pipes are bursting, that their roads are crumbling, that their electric rates continue to rise, that their commutes are taking longer, that their city plan spend more time trying to ensure that everyone’s front yards look alike than actually making the city a better place to live.
We live in a great country, but we’ve gotten so used to enjoying the benefits of it that we never face the fact that there are some costs that need to be borne also. A longer-term perspective helps us think about what we can do to make things better and to maintain what we already have. I hope you will join me in contacting your state and local officials to ask that they invest in the future of your community.
