Fixing America's Infrastructure

Timon Singh

Last week, President Obama unveiled his plans for America's infrastructure system in his State of the Union speech. Mentioned were the country's plans for high-speed rail, clean energy jobs and the benefits of the stimulus packages.

For a reaction on the speech, we spoke to the President of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Blaine D. Leonard for his thoughts and what he thinks is crucial to improving America's infrastructure.

Let's start off talking about President Obama's State of the Union address; I read your blog on the American Society of Civil Engineers website where you talk about how we're essentially "still driving on Eisenhower's roads and sending our kids to Roosevelt's schools". Do you think America's infrastructure plans seem to have gotten lost in the recent year or do you think they are going in the right direction?

No, I think we have - I think we have lost track of our infrastructure plans. We had an enormous surge of infrastructure construction starting in the 1950s and running for about 30 or 40 years with our interstate highway system and with construction of water and sewer systems, and a number of other things. But I think we became somewhat complacent and started to ignore them - we've lost track.

Now, in the last five or ten years, I think we've started to put the message out there again, and our government leaders have picked up on the message and have started to talk about infrastructure again. President Obama certainly talked about infrastructure in his State of the Union, and he's done so at other times but the real question is: Will the administration follow through?

So far, they have to a small degree, but not a large one. For instance, our transportation system, at a federal level, is funded by six-year transportation authorization bills...

The bill for $500 billion over six years?

Yes. And the last one expired in the fall, and there has been no significant movement by the administration towards reauthorizing that. If the administration is really interested in jobs and infrastructure, then the transportation bill would be a great way to do that. It's long-term. It's permanent. It's solid. It creates job. It builds things. And just talking about the infrastructure doesn't get it built.

You talked about creating a new project for new jobs, but in President Obama's infrastructure stimulus, he put $80 billion aside for new projects. This was only a tenth of the stimulus however and the other nine tenths was going to go repairing, as you say in your blog, "the broken water mains, the grid-locked streets, the crumbling dams and levees"; parts of America's infrastructure that are essentially falling apart. Do you think it's kind of a fine line to walk between repairing what needs to be repaired and starting new infrastructure projects?

It is a fine line, because while we have sort of lost track of constructing new infrastructure in the last couple of decades, we have also failed to adequately maintain what we have. In some places around the country, we have done some - and where I live is one example of that - we've done some pretty significant new construction of infrastructure. But, at the same time, our shortfall in maintenance of existing infrastructure is pretty significant.

So, the stimulus was helpful in that a fair share of the infrastructure money in the stimulus package did go toward some routine maintenance things, and that is necessary. That needs to be ramped up as well. We have to find a balance between maintaining what we have and constructing new. We find, in general, that if you can take a particular infrastructure element and put a small amount of money into maintenance of that element before it gets too deteriorated, you can extend its life pretty significantly. Whereas, if you wait just a little longer until the deterioration really sort of steps in, you end-up having to replace it at a cost that's ten times more than the maintenance cost.

Such as the Interstate-35 bridge disaster...

That's true.

Another part of America's infrastructure that has come under fire for not being properly maintained is America's water system. I read a shocking fact the other day that over seven billion gallons of treated water leak out of America's pipes every day. Now, the cost for maintaining America's water system, pipes, and dams, must be astronomical. But how does that weigh-up to the cost of wasted water that must just amount up over the years?

I don't have a good cost comparison on that number, but clearly water is a resource that we want to conserve and letting treated water go wasted through leakage is really just unacceptable. The interesting irony of this is that we have very good quality drinking water in the United States, as you do in most of the developed world, and it's safe and people rely on it and use it. In some parts of the country, I suspect, they have plentiful water and losing a little maybe isn't a huge concern of theirs but the problem with the system isn't the quality of the water. The problem with the system is the conveyance of the water, and many of our pipe systems are 100 years old and deteriorating.

And, of course, it's very expensive to replace buried water systems, especially in urban areas. But, one of the things we've started to notice in many areas around the country are water-line breaks, which are very disruptive. They can cause significant damage in eroding-away roads and washing away other facilities and damaging homes. But, they also disrupt water supply and sometimes other utilities for a period of days in that area. We've seen - we're starting to see a number of pretty significant water-line breaks. So, in addition to the cost of the wasted treated water, we also are starting to incur damage costs from lines breaking. And this is simply a result of the aging water conveyance system.

One of the most recent ones of those was last fall in the Baltimore area. It caused them to close schools and it damaged the roadway and it damaged some other utilities and it caused a large number of people to be put on a boil-your-water watch. So, it's a pretty significant problem.

Last year a New York Times writer called Louis Uchitelle basically slammed the U.S. infrastructure industry, saying that for the first time in memory, the nation has no outside public works project under way. He said that while repairing America's infrastructure was important for safety reasons, it failed to create any permanent wealth. Do you agree that a lack of mega-projects going on in the States has hampered the development of the country to a certain degree?

I think it may have hampered it a little bit. I'm familiar with his article. He actually talked to me as he was writing that article. He and I talked about some of the lack of major projects, although I think that has had an impact on us in recent years.

I think its potential is to have a major impact on us. And it's not so much, "Do we have super-projects going on," but in general, if we're not updating our infrastructure to meet our needs and handle our growth, we won't be able to compete with other parts of the world where that is happening. And if a business wants to expand and they can't get adequate water supplies, adequate power, decent transportation infrastructure to service their facilities, they'll find someplace else to go. And that has a major impact on our community.

Our power grid is an example of that. Our power grid is fairly outdated and at capacity, and at huge risk. And we saw a few years ago, maybe 1998, or '99, a major power outage in the northeast quadrant of the United States, brought about by a fairly small storm incident in one location; caused a black-out that impacted tens of millions of people for several days. It's a result of our power grid being out of date and not smart enough. Well, if we don't deal with that, industries will find our system to be unreliable and they'll find someplace else to go. So, that's a real problem.

Just following on from what you said there, that is one of the major projects that's meant to be going on in America, modernizing the U.S. power grid with a smart grid. And the cost to do that surely outweighs the economical disadvantages of having rolling blackouts across the country every now and then, whenever there's a storm. Do you think that the smart grid is something that can essentially be developed within the next few years? Because America's growing at a rate where its power demands are outweighing what can be supplied?

Our power demand for electricity has grown by about 25 percent in the last 20 years. And so, you're right, we are rapidly expanding our demand and from an environmental standpoint, from a sustainability standpoint, we need to deal with that as well. We need to curb our demand by being more efficient in what we do. Can the grid be updated in a period of several years? Not without some significant leadership from the federal government and some significant funding invested in the system. We can do a lot of things as a nation. I think we've shown this over the years. We can accomplish a lot with the right kind of leadership and the right kind of funding.

The interstate highway is a great example. The space program is a great example of something that, when we really put our mind to it and put our resources to it, we accomplish amazing things in a decade.

Although, it looks like the space program now might be privatized...

Yeah, there's a real argument going on now about how to approach the space program and I believe the President slashed a major piece of money out of the - at least the manned space program.

I think his intent is to focus on more research and some un-manned exploration. But, we talk about job creation, we talk about infrastructure, the plan - the program that he cancelled will cost thousands of jobs in industries around the country that are in the middle of that program. So, there's clearly an impact to what he did there, too. So, we talk about creating jobs, but slashing that program costs lots of jobs.

In your blog, you say that the president's leadership on infrastructure is essential for America's future prosperity. With essentially the president's commitment to high-speed rail services and clean energy, do you think America is ready for the 21st century? Or do you think its aging infrastructure is holding it back?

I don't think we're ready for the 21st century. I think our aging infrastructure is a problem, and we need to address it. And I'm encouraged by his emphasis on developing high-speed rail. I think that's appropriate for certain corridors of our country where we have large population density, and that's the right thing to do, and as an organization we support that; ASC supports that endeavor. The proof will be in the next couple of years.

The allocation that's been made, at least in the stimulus package and the announcement that came out about how that's gonna get spent for high-speed rail was just a few weeks ago, the commitment is $8 billion. That's a fraction, a mere fraction, of what's really gonna be needed to really develop high-speed rail. I mean, that was allocated to about three or four different major project areas around the country, so each one of those areas got one to two and a half billion dollars.

I think California and Florida actually got $3 billion of that, each. So, that's $2 billion for the other regions...

A $3 billion investment is a significant start. But, the California light-rail line, I'm taking a guess here, but it must be worth - you know, the construction of that must be $150 billion. So, the proof will really be whether the president's leadership extends to the next step of really providing adequate funding, stable funding, and consistent funding for those kinds of projects. And not only just high-speed rail and clean energy projects, but our highway transportation system, our dams, revolving funds for our water systems, all of the above.

So, that's where the proof needs to come is we need significant leadership, but it needs to be consistent, and it needs to be followed with leadership and providing the adequate kind of funding.

And in the past - in the past we've found that major things we've accomplished in this country have come from - have come as a result of federal leadership. And even if it's mostly locally constructed and partially locally financed, federal leadership, a federal master-plan, and federal funding or funding guarantees is really essential.

Blaine D. Leonard is the President of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is also currently the Research Program Manager at the Utah Department of Transportation.