We had friends from Australia staying with us for a month when the I-35 bridge collapsed. We were all in the van going somewhere, listening to the radio when they announced it.
And one of our friends looked at us and asked, “Is this a… normal occurrence, in America?”
Here’s a list of structurally deficient bridges, if you’re interested. But it’s not just bridges that are at risk, it’s every aspect of our aging infrastructure since we seem less and less keen on putting any money into it.
This is absolutely true but also.. kinda not.
The US is massively huge. Even people who live here forget that sometimes, and visitors from foreign lands don’t grasp it even while visiting. I’ve been asked by Norwegian visitors if we could “pop over to Chicago” for some authentic deep dish pizza.. which is 700 miles from Atlanta.
Which means yes, infrastructure is crumbling in some places. But not everywhere. It’s a very regional phenomenon, and entirely based on economic factors.
For instance, Georgia DOT is amazing.
Our roads are free of potholes, they’re constantly repaving and fixing stuff. At the county level, there’s a (voter approved) 1% tax entirely set aside for infrastructure improvements like new traffic lights, crosswalks, sidewalks, and roads.
The only bridge collapse in recent memory was due to a fire, set by arson. A portion of I85 collapsed in Atlanta in March 2017. By August 2017 – five months later – the entire 10-lane bridge had been replaced.
So yeah, there’s a lot of failing infrastructure in the United States. But it’s mostly in economically depressed regions.
Hey, that’s awesome to hear. I’ve lived in Virginia, Florida, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Georgia, and Washington State – sure, city to city even, things are different.
Minneapolis/St. Paul is not an economically-depressed region, though. Neither is New York City, where no one is putting money needed into the subway system for basic maintenance. My point is we have infrastructure that is widely and generally failing, and a Federal government that seems less and less inclined to serve the states in doing anything about it.
american people: … that doesn’t sound like an improvement … it sounds kinda…. bad
donald trump: that’s because it is. be gone peasants.
Doing a quick look for a refresher on exactly where the Roan Highlands lie (answer: closer to Bristol and Boone than Asheville), I was also struck again by how little sense the colonial political boundaries make. We’re looking at the corners of five different states, within the relatively small area shown here. The red marker is for a little town on the Tennessee side of the border with NC, which runs along the ridgeline of Roan Mountain (and the Unakas more generally).
It still makes so much more sense to look at things in terms of topography and river drainages, and the travel routes related to that geography. Not to mention historical events and geopolitical relationships–which are just never going to be understandable in terms of political boundaries which didn’t even exist until recently. (Which I sometimes have to think the people in charge are counting on with how they’re presenting what info they’ve chosen, but hey. Reminded again of another map I had to comment on a while back.)
Anyway, with this particular map area, to great extent it still makes more sense to think in terms of existing pre-Colonial travel and trade routes tying the whole place together–and connecting up other areas. With a lot of the major roads/rail lines/etc. following sections of that, because of course they would. Also town sites getting taken over, but hey.
That’s no less relevant (or historically important) than the Roman-built road network here in the UK which were the only decent roads for centuries and went on to form the backbone of the modern highway system. lncluding right in front of our house. But, of course that doesn’t get talked about much in the US. I kind of wish I could find my copy of Alan Briceland’s Westward from Virginia: The Exploration of the Virginia-Carolina Frontier, 1650-1710 right now, but it’s still packed up in a box somewhere. (And I see my rating from 5 years ago is the only one on Goodreads 😅) It goes into some detail for that exact area, and I didn’t even know how much of the current infrastructure got built up from what was already there. Of course that doesn’t just apply to this particular region, it’s just the one I know the most about.
I grew up in Bluefield (on the WV side–the gold star at that zoom level), then Radford (VA). Which was right at a major hub, with multiple other major route branches within 50 miles. (Roanoke/Salem is just off that map view, to the NE.) Including easy access right down the Blue Ridge to what’s now Cherokee National Forest and the Roan Highlands, yeah. Where I-81 parallels the main route down there now. Besides the longterm trade routes toward the Chesapeake, Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico, up toward Maine, etc. But sure, the geographical isolation and backwardness! 🙄
Anyway, I had to think of that again too, with the distance there looking like nothing from where I’m sitting now. It never really was that much, in more ways than one.
But speedily built projects are worthless if they become damaged beyond repair in just a few years. They likely will, as flooding is the country’s most common natural disaster. It’s also the costliest: FEMA estimates that flood damage cost Americans $260 billion from 1980 to 2013. Federal flood insurance claims are also through the roof, averaging $1.9 billion annually from 2006 to 2015. And as we work to fix these projects that weren’t protected from flooding, the working class people who Trump promised to protect will suffer most from the loss of their rail line, bridge, fire station, housing project, or hospital. “This is climate science denial at its most dangerous, as Trump is putting vulnerable communities, federal employees, and families at risk by throwing out any guarantee that our infrastructure will be safe,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement. What makes all this so confounding is that Trump clearly recognizes the threat of sea level rise. Last year, he applied for a permit to build a sea wall to prevent erosion at his oceanfront golf resort in Ireland. Trump later withdrew that permit—because of opposition from locals, not because the threat disappeared. As Politico reported, the application included an environmental impact statement that said, “If the predictions of an increase in sea level rise as a result of global warming prove correct, however, it is likely that there will be a corresponding increase in coastal erosion rates … around much of the coastline of Ireland. In our view, it could reasonably be expected that the rate of sea level rise might become twice of that presently occurring….”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 