Throughout the recent presidential campaign, several topics were discussed ad nauseam. In debates, interviews, campaign ads and stump speeches, the economy, taxes, job creation, national security and the national deficit got a lot of attention. But it has become clear that unless we have a catastrophic failure of another piece of infrastructure, there is little likelihood that our imperiled roads and bridges will receive the attention they deserve. And without a political push, federal funding will not be provided to correct decades of neglect.
The U.S. has 4,000 dams in danger of bursting and flooding cities and towns. Our clean water pipes leak an estimated 10-billion gal. of water a day. Congested roads cause more than $87 billion in wasted gas and loss to our economy. There are 7,980 bridges we rely on to keep commerce going that are in danger of collapsing, just as the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis did in August 2007. These certainly sound like economic and national security problems to me, and finding ways to fix them would put people back to work.