America's Crumbling Infrastructure: I-5 Bridge Collapse Should Be a Wake Up Call

Thankfully, it appears that no one died but the collapse of the Skagit River bridge on Interstate 5 in Washington State (I-5 links Seattle with Canada), but the event ought to be a wake up call nation wide that the GOP and Tea Party opposition to taxes is putting our lives at risk on a daily basis.  Highways, bridges and other critical infrastructure doesn't magically maintain or pay for itself.  Here are details from the Seattle Post:

The collapse of a freeway bridge into the Skagit River derailed a key part of the Northwest's transportation system, but amazingly failed to claim any lives..

Three people suffered non-life-threatening injuries in the dramatic collapse of the Interstate 5 bridge, which occurred around 7 p.m. Thursday. Traffic was snarled on the freeway and nearby roads, and will likely remain so; investigators and one of the survivors say an oversized truck may have been to blame.

A car, a truck and a travel trailer fell into the water in the collapse. All three people who went into the Skagit were rescued safely. 

The Washington Post adds more to the story:

[M]iraculously, authorities said it appeared nobody was killed in the bridge failure that raised the question about the safety of aging spans and cut off the main route between Seattle and Canada.


Traffic along the heavily travelled route could be affected for some time.  “The I-5 corridor is totally disrupted,” said Gov. Jay Inslee, who went to the scene Thursday night.  He said work has already started to design detours, but state Transportation Secretary Lynn Peterson asked people to avoid I-5 in the area for the next several days.

The National Transportation Safety Board was sending an investigative team.

“The bridge just went down, it crashed through the water,” he said. “It was really surreal.”  The bridge was about 50 feet above the water. Deyerin said it appeared that two vehicles - a car and the pickup with the travel trailer attached - fell into the river. He said the water depth was about 15 feet, and the vehicles half-visible in the water likely were resting on portions of the collapsed bridge.

The bridge was not classified as structurally deficient, but a Federal Highway Administration database listed it as being “functionally obsolete” — a category meaning that the design is outdated, such as having narrow shoulders and low clearance underneath.

The bridge was built in 1955 and has a sufficiency rating of 57.4 out of 100, according to federal records. That is well below the statewide average rating of 80, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data, but 759 bridges in the state have a lower sufficiency score.

According to a 2012 Skagit County Public Works Department report, 42 of the county’s 108 bridges are 50 years or older. The document says eight of the bridges are more than 70 years old and two are over 80.

Washington state was given a C in the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2013 infrastructure report card and a C- when it came to the state’s bridges. The group said more than a quarter of Washington’s 7,840 bridges are considered structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

On our drive to Alexandria, Virginia, today on I-64 and I-95 we will cross bridges that are equally old and I shudder to think what their state of repair might be.  The surface of the I-64 bridge entering Richmond is in horrible repair and I surely hope that the under structure is in better repair.  Naturally, GOP gubernatorial nominee/nutcase Ken Cuccinelli wants to cut Virginia taxes further - I guess he thinks God will miraculously repair Virginia's crumbling highways.

The GOP War Against the Nation's Infrastructure

In order to give tax breaks to the wealthy, today's Republicans are willing to slash programs for the poor and needy even as billions of dollars continue to be squandered in the fool's errand wars launched by Chimperator George W. Bush and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  But there is another victim of the Republican Party's reverse Robin Hood agenda: the nation's crumbling infrastructure.  Here in Virginia the highway system is becoming increasingly inadequate and in Hampton Roads the transportation is so stressed at rush hour that the situation is harming economic growth.  But will the Virginia GOP vote to increase the gasoline tax which hasn't been raise in a quarter of a century?  Of course not.  They would rather abdicate responsibility and enter into "public-private" arrangements where private interest will rape Virginians with tolls and fees with little accountability to taxpayers.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this nationwide problem of our crumbling infrastructure.  Just imagine what could have been accomplished if billions and billions of dollars had not been squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Here are column excerpts:

Across the coasts of New York and New Jersey, hundreds of millions of gallons of raw and partially treated sewage are spilling into waterways and the ocean. The immediate cause is equipment damage from Hurricane Sandy, but as Michael Schwirtz recently reported in The Times, aging plants like one in Nassau County on Long Island were leaking long before the storm, flooding neighborhood streets with sewage during downpours.

There are thousands of faltering sewage plants like these across the country, staffed by operators who dread rainy days. Civil engineers in every state are monitoring ominous cracks in roads and bridges that carry freight and school buses. And millions of transit commuters are awaiting new equipment and long-deferred maintenance on systems that are reliable only when the sun is shining. 

The need for investment in public works, never more urgent, has become a casualty of Washington’s ideological wars. Republicans were once reliable partners in this kind of necessary spending. But since President Obama spent about 12 percent of the 2009 stimulus on transportation, energy and other infrastructure programs, Republicans have made it a policy to demonize these kinds of investments. 

When the president asked recently for a modest $50 billion for transportation improvements in the “fiscal cliff” talks, Republicans literally laughed out loud. There will be no stimulus in any deal, said Representative Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, the incoming chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Big government construction projects put people to work, and those new jobs have enormous ripple effects — $1.44 in benefits for every government dollar spent on public works. An infrastructure bank for energy and water projects, started with $10 billion in government seed money, could leverage hundreds of billions in private investments. 

But the biggest reason to spend money on these projects is that they are desperately needed in every city and state. Around the country, there are 70,000 structurally deficient bridges; one of them, in southern New Jersey, collapsed under a train last week, sending tank cars full of flammable gas into a creek. There are 4,000 dams in need of repair, and the electrical grid in this supposedly advanced country ranks 32nd in the world in reliability, behind Slovenia’s. Those Republicans who deride this investment as worthless stimulus might want to explain to freezing homeowners why it is too expensive to bury fragile power lines.

Most estimates put the cost of basic repairs at more than $2 trillion, and that does not even include long-range upgrades to the electrical grid, storm protection and mass transit.  Around the country, ridership on transit has grown significantly since the 1990s, but federal investments have fallen far short. The Transportation Department says that if $18 billion were spent every year — 40 percent more than is being spent now — transit systems might get to a state of good repair by 2028.

The NextGen satellite program desperately needed to replace the nation’s clogged air traffic control system will cost at least $30 billion, but much of that money is likely to be cut by the automatic sequester of spending put in place by Republicans last year. This investment will ultimately save the airline industry vast amounts now lost to delays and excess fuel consumption, but like so many other important projects, it is being eroded in the blind ideological rush to cut everything. As bridges fall, subway riders are stranded and flight delays pile up, the cost of this shortsightedness will continue to mount.