Third World America (13 page)

The stimulus bill included $8 billion for high-speed rail projects in thirty states, linking cities such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Chicago—$1.25 billion going to a high-speed rail corridor between Orlando and Tampa.
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Of course, high-speed rail systems everywhere would be great, but there are obvious political considerations behind sprinkling the money all over the country.
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The fact is, the highest trafficked section of the nation’s rail system, the limping northeast corridor from
Boston to Washington, D.C., is in dire need of renovation but received only $112 million.

So while this new investment is a start, it’s only a drop in the bucket.
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And while trains going over 200 miles per hour would be great, as Vanderbilt puts it, “We would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration.”

Out-of-date, overpriced, slow-moving, rickety, and routinely late trains can be frustrating and inconvenient. Out-of-date bridges can be downright deadly—as we’ve seen in the past decade with high-profile bridge collapses in Minnesota and Oklahoma.

According to the Department of Transportation, one in four of America’s bridges is either “structurally deficient” or “functionally obsolete.”
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The numbers are even worse when it comes to bridges in urban areas, where one in three bridges is deficient (no small matter given the higher levels of passenger and freight traffic in our nation’s cities).

The problem is pretty basic: The average bridge in our country has a lifespan of fifty years and is now forty-three years old.
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We’d need to invest $850 billion over the next fifty years to get all of America’s bridges into good shape. That’s $17 billion a year. At the moment, we’re spending only $10.5 billion a year.

As a result, we all too often find our attention drawn to places such as Webbers Falls, Oklahoma.

It was May 2002, and Webbers Falls, 140 miles east of Oklahoma City, had been pounded by heavy rains.
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But that
didn’t deter people from driving across Interstate 40 to get together with family and friends on a busy Memorial Day weekend. Some 35 miles west of the Arkansas state line, a long line of cars and trucks was crossing the 1967-built bridge, 1,988 feet of concrete and steel spanning the swollen Arkansas River.

Down in the river, towboat captain William Joe Dedmon was pushing two barges when he suffered an attack of cardiac arrhythmia, and the barges ended up hitting the bridge’s support.
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Up above, a six-hundred-foot section of the bridge suddenly gave way—and a dozen cars, two tractor-trailer rigs, and a horse trailer plunged seventy-five feet into the water below.
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In an instant, the Arkansas River turned into a graveyard—one littered with concrete slabs, diapers, dead horses, and broken car seats.
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Fourteen people died that day, including a three-year-old girl, and scores more were injured. “Officials set up a morgue inside city hall,” the
Bowling Green Daily News
reported.
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“Victims’ families were told to go to the community center in Gore, on the other side of the river.” Because of the high and murky water, divers had a hard time retrieving the dead from the cars that were submerged and stacked on top of one another in the river’s fast currents.

Six years later, one quarter of Oklahoma’s bridges still needed overhaul or replacement. Indeed, the state had the dubious distinction of leading the nation in the percentage of structurally deficient bridges.
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And Oklahoma is far from alone. In August 2007, the Interstate 35W steel truss bridge over the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis collapsed during evening rush hour, killing 13 and injuring 145.
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The bridge had been inspected each year by the state’s Department of Transportation, but clearly the patchwork repairs were not sufficient.
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All across the country, patch and pray remains the order of
the day … until the next bridge comes falling down. How many more will it take—and how many more people have to die—before a more serious effort is made?

We’ve seen similar tragedies with America’s dams.

On March 16, 2006, the Ka Loko Dam in Kilauea, Hawaii, collapsed.
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“Seven people died when the Ka Loko Dam breached after weeks of heavy rain, sending 1.6 million tons of water downstream,” the
Honolulu Star Bulletin
reported. Among the dead were a child and a woman eight months pregnant. The breach created an ecological disaster of torn-up streams, reefs, and coastal waterways.
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The Ka Loko Dam was not considered a “high-hazard dam.” It was, however, like all dams, supposed to be regularly inspected. According to Hawaii congresswoman Mazie Hirono, it was not.
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Dams are a vital part of America’s infrastructure. They help provide water for drinking, irrigation, and agriculture, generate much-needed power, and offer protection from floods.

Yet our dams are growing old. There are more than 85,000 dams in America—and the average age is fifty-one years old.
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At the same time, more and more people are moving into developments located below dams that require significantly greater safety standards—but we’ve had a hard time keeping up with the increase in these so-called high-hazard dams. Indeed, we are falling further and further behind. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, “Over the past six years, for every deficient, high hazard potential dam repaired, nearly two more were declared deficient.”

It would take $12.5 billion over the next five years to properly upgrade our nation’s dams.
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The estimated spending on dams over that time is $5.05 billion—a projected shortfall of $7.45 billion. Plus, of our 85,000 dams, the federal government regulates fewer than 10,000.
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The rest are the responsibility of the states—most of which are facing large budget deficits. For example, the ASCE reports that in 2007 Texas had “only seven engineers with an annual budget of only $435,000 to regulate more than 7,500 dams. Worse still, Alabama does not have a dam safety program despite the fact that there are more than 2,000 dams in the state.”

In 2007, during congressional testimony on levee and dam safety programs, New York congressman John Hall gave an account of what some New York dams looked like after a period of heavy rains.
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“Yesterday,” he said, “I visited three dams, all of which are over one hundred years old, in my district. The Whaley Lake Dam has boils on its surface. It’s a dam that’s largely earth and rock with some concrete structure. It has a frozen relief valve for the emergency release forty-eight-inch pipe, and that valve is in the middle of the dam, where it would not be accessible were the dam being overtopped by high water.”

Similar stories could be told across the country.

In 2005, even those most determined to deny our deteriorating condition came face-to-face with Third World America as the levees around New Orleans burst during Hurricane Katrina. More than 1,800 people died. For weeks our government
seemed incapable of even retrieving the bodies from the city’s flooded streets, much less finding housing and food for those who were evacuated from their homes.

This great American tragedy was not created by the perfect storm of killer winds and driving rain, as President Bush told us. It was a catastrophe that was entirely man-made—produced by our compromised political process.

Like any number of agencies charged with protecting the public, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which author and satirist Harry Shearer has called “the true poster child for federal incompetence,” has lost its way.
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“The Corps,” Shearer writes, “tasked by a 1960s Congress to protect New Orleans from severe hurricanes, failed, by its own standards, and according to its own post-mortem. More independent observers, like the UC Berkeley Independent Levee Investigation Team, had an even harsher verdict. Yet who’s blithely going about fixing that which they screwed up so royally? The Corps. Who’s reviewing their work? If anybody, engineers approved and paid by … the Corps.” Instead of fulfilling its responsibility to build and efficiently maintain the country’s waterways infrastructure, the Corps became yet another tool of a cabal of highly politicized officials using government for their own ends.
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After trying to deflect blame and cover up its shoddy work, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was forced to publicly own up to its systemic failures that led to the disaster that befell New Orleans.

The politicians who prioritize the Corps’s workload and projects and grant it funding are also to blame, swayed as they are by the lobbyists and engineering firms whose contributions earn them the right to “recommend” what projects the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers should be pursuing. You won’t be surprised to learn that these projects often coincide with the very same services offered by clients of the lobbyists.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates it would cost $100 billion to refurbish the nation’s levees.
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But even harder to come by are the political reforms needed to ensure that the $100 billion would be spent in a way that actually did what it was supposed to.

Fortifying America’s infrastructure is not just about patching up our antiquated systems. It’s also about laying the groundwork for an efficient and equitable society that can compete with the fast-rising economies of the twenty-first century. This means that, along with repairing our decaying roads, bridges, dams, and electric grid, we have to invest in building the kind of high-tech infrastructure that can keep us in the game in the future.

For starters, we need to kick our high-speed Internet plans into high gear. A robust, broadband-charged, country-wide information superhighway is going to be key to staying ahead of the innovation curve. Over the next ten years, there will be a five-hundredfold increase in the amount of information traveling on the nation’s information superhighway.
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New products coming onto the market—including video conferencing, video on demand, and geographic information systems mapping—will increasingly need to work on broadband’s higher transmission speeds.

Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski explains that broadband isn’t just important for faster email and video games—it’s the central nervous system for democracies and economies of the future: “Broadband is indispensable infrastructure for the twenty-first century.
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It is already becoming the foundation for our economy and democracy in the twenty-first century … [and] will be our central platform for innovation in the twenty-first century.”

How indispensable is it? In a study of 120 countries, researchers found that every 10 percent increase in broadband adoption increased a country’s GDP by 1.3 percent.
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Even a farmer these days needs high-speed Internet to stay in touch with world commodity prices and access the latest information on weather and planting and seed technologies.
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Unfortunately, when it comes to broadband, America is also falling behind.

In 2001, the United States ranked fourth among industrialized countries in broadband access.
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By 2009, we had dropped to fifteenth. As for average broadband download speed, we rank nineteenth. Over one hundred million Americans still don’t have broadband in their homes.
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And while 83 percent of college graduates in the United States have access to broadband, only 52 percent of high school graduates do.
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Breaking the numbers down by race and income reveals depressing discrepancies. For instance, around 65 percent of Asian Americans, Caucasians, and Hispanics use broadband at home; that usage rate falls to 46 percent for African Americans. Among households earning more than $100,000 a year, 88 percent have access to broadband versus 54 percent among households making between $30,000 and $40,000. And the
split between rural and city folk? Broadband has penetrated just 46 percent of the farming community, compared to 67 percent for the rest of the country.

To help close the widening gap between us and the rest of the digitally connected world, the Obama administration has proposed a national broadband plan, with the goal of increasing broadband access from around 63 percent currently to 90 percent by 2020.
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The plan would also ensure that every high school graduate is digitally literate. This sounds great. But 2020? That hardly has the sense of urgency you’d expect from a country that is quickly falling behind. If it’s truly a priority and important to national security and the relative position of the United States in the world, why put it off for a decade?

As bad as America’s sewers, roads, bridges, dams, and water and power systems are, they pale in comparison to the crisis we are facing in our schools.

I’m not talking about the physical state of our dilapidated public school buildings—although the National Education Association estimates it would take $322 billion to bring America’s school buildings into good repair.
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The real devastation is going on inside our nation’s classrooms. If America’s public education system were a product, it would have been recalled. If it were a politician, it would have been impeached. If it were a horse, it would have been taken behind the barn and shot.

Nothing is quickening our descent into Third World status faster than our resounding failure to properly educate our
children. This failure has profound consequences for our future, both at home and as we look to compete with the rest of the world in the global economy.