Copley News Service
Courtesy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Millions of Americans were horrified last week by the images of and stories about the collapsed and smoldering Interstate 35W highway bridge over the Mississippi River at Minneapolis. The randomness of who happened to be in the cars and trucks on the bridge at the precise moment it failed made it all too easy for us to imagine ourselves or our loved ones cast by fate into such a scene.
As the investigation into the Minneapolis tragedy digs for specifics, national, state and local attention is focusing on the nation's dangerously aging infrastructure -- a word that usually makes eyes glaze over and jaws go slack.
In a society in which attention spans are measured in minutes, that presents a particular challenge. Bridges, roads, water mains and electrical grids don't deteriorate overnight, and fixing things will take time and, yes, sacrifice.
Complicating the task will be anti-government and anti-tax attitudes that have become deeply ingrained in the collective American psyche over the last generation.
We've been told for so long that government is the enemy and that taxation is oppression that the very of ideas of the common welfare, public services and shared responsibility for them have come to seem almost bizarre.
Let's take stock: Roads, bridges, tunnels and dams are built, inspected and, in most cases, maintained by our governments. It takes money. Bridge and dam inspections take place out of the public eye, and if there's anything glamorous about maintenance, it escapes us. Meanwhile, public servants from presidential candidates to state legislators to mayors win elections by promising to cut taxes. When tax revenues come up short, maintenance can be an attractive area to shortchange.
Two years ago, the American Society of Civil Engineers issued a report card on the nation's infrastructure. The good news is that bridges earned a solid C. The bad news is that, except for our landfills, that was the highest grade.
Dams, drinking water, aviation, energy, roads and rail all earned Ds.
The society found that 17 percent of Illinois bridges, for example, are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. The percentage in Missouri was twice as high: 35 percent.
It's too soon to say exactly why the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis failed last week. But there is painful precedent to show that once the horror and attention recede, so does the resolve to address problems in a serious, meaningful way.
The civil engineering society estimates it will take $188 billion over the next 20 years just to fix the nation's ailing bridges; it will take even more to take care of our failing dams and deteriorating highways.
Generating public understanding of the problem and public support for raising and wisely spending the money required to do those jobs will take exceptional political leadership. Failing that, we'll need more than good luck to live with the results.
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