Midwest floods spotlight decrepit US infrastructure
July 1st, 2008 | by admin |By Andrew Stern
CHICAGO, July 1 (Reuters) - The latest U.S. naturaldisaster is triggering fresh rounds of concern and debate abouthow to repair America’s aging infrastructure.
The worst Midwest flooding since 1993 has generated imagesof swamped towns, cracked roads, washed-out bridges,overwhelmed dams, failed levees, broken sewage systems, stuntedcrops and water-logged refugees.
The losses are in the billions of dollars and stillmounting, as the costs of crop losses alone send shocks throughthe inflation-wracked world food system and threaten insurers.
The disaster has reminded policymakers of the decrepitstate of U.S. infrastructure, stirring concerns similar tothose following the deadly Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007and the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in2005.
Even before the latest flooding, a group representingengineers said the United States needed to spend about $1trillion more than it does now to bring infrastructure up topar with modern needs and standards.
“The patch-and-pray approach simply won’t succeed,” saidDavid Mongan, head of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
But the group also said its five-year cost estimate wasoutdated and does not count the price of new roads, rails, andsewers required by a growing population, nor the cost to repairdamage inflicted by the recent Midwest floods.
President George W. Bush has asked Congress for $1.8billion to boost funds for flood recovery but it is unclear howmuch of that money will end up in infrastructure repair.
