Risks soar, bills come due as 20th-century dams crumble
eenews.net
eenews.net
The problem is fundamental to human organizations. People like hearing what they want to hear. And any organization without disasters for long enough will lose barriers to having sycophants who say that rise to positions of power. The necessary result is a growing disconnect with reality.
As Feynman warned, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." People and organizations tend to remember this after absorbing the lessons from a disaster.
But a generation or two of no disaster returns sycophants to power. Guaranteeing that the next preventable disaster will some day come.
That day may come very soon indeed.
Then the river flooded. If you were in the floodplain it was epic, if you were not it was nothing. The way I see it now is that developers will do what they can get away with and politicians will do whatever helps them stay in office. People really need to take responsibility for not being in the way of failing infrastructure, it's the only thing that works in our political system.
It may require a series of truly extreme disasters.
The US has become unimaginably prosperous and that power can be wielded to mislead and misguide and protect those who would siphon off its wealth for their purposes. And even to allow those the disasters which have occurred to benefit this same group - the "lesson" of the September 11th attacks was that we needed an even larger military-industrial complex and so-forth ad-infinitum. Fear so far has only kept one group in power and not even made that group itself fearful of the actual disasters looming but only fearful of losing that power.
Although, thankfully, nobody was hurt.
Then with most of the doors installed and open, a big storm blows up. Bridge is riding lower in the water due to the cut water. Water comes in and floods from cell to cell, and soon you've got a bunch of tugboats holding the surviving bridge from busting off its remaining anchor lines.
That wasn't a case of decaying infrastructure (other than it was a retrofit), that was a case of construction mishap, along with a side of "If you had meant to sink a bridge, I don't suppose you could do anything more to hurry it along other than drilling a hole in the bottom(1)".
(1) Which I've done/supervised, without the subsequent sinking of the bridge.
But I agree that the US should take some of its military budget and use it to protect its citizens by fixing its infrastructure, fixing its road safety (100 people dying every day, are you kidding me?), and getting basic health care for everyone. And you could even twist that kind of political change in "America first".
Out of 300+ million. 100 people dying is one car accident per state per day, effectively. That seems like a very low, very tolerable rate.
I can't help but think about all the other countries who actually invest in their infrastructure and in public needs and have far better outcomes and social cohesion than the US. There's something wrong with this countries system of governance I feel.
Here in Japan, the government is surely also corrupt, with "bridges to nowhere" and construction contracts assigned on a buddy-buddy basis. But at least here that corruption still nets us well-maintained roads and top-notch train infrastructure... just arguably too much of it and at a high cost. In the US they end up with the high costs but none of the good infrastructure...
Sounds bad but the outcome is more or less as follows, if my rather vague memory (I was in said school when it opened ;), and finding summaries of local events from the 70s on the internet is not straightforward) is accurate:
* some combination of the village's mayor and/or builder went to jail
* the village residents had to pay extra taxes to cover the overbuilt school's costs
* growing up, I had a really nice school (nice play yard, lots of classroom space, dedicated gym, swimming pool with adjustable depth so regular swimming lessons, etc)
* eventually, the population of the village increased enough that the school was actually a useful size (it's more than quadrupled, from the mid 300s to ~1600, since the 70s)
It feels like somehow the failures modes of "bad government" are less bad than they could be ("at least we got something for our corruption!").
eh compare to italy where instead of overbuilding they either cheat on the materials used or skip controls and evaluations...
again http://www.leggo.it/photos/HIGH/61/62/1726162_studente.jpg
and again https://bl24-bitrecallsrl.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/...
and again http://www.meteoweb.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/terremoto-...
every time a quake strikes some public building goes down and almost every time nobody does a day of jail, unless it's small fishes.
so well there are bad failure modes as well.
Some years ago a small rural town in Spain twinned with a similar town in Greece. The mayor of the Greek town visited the Spanish town. When he saw the palatial mansion belonging to the Spanish mayor, he wondered aloud how on earth he could afford such a house.
The Spaniard replied: ‘You see that bridge over there? The EU gave us a grant to construct a two-lane bridge, but by building a single lane bridge with traffic lights at either end, I could build this place.’
The following year the Spaniard visited the Greek town. He was simply amazed at the Greek mayor's house: gold taps, marble floors, diamond doorknobs, it was marvellous.
When he asked how he’d raised the money to build this incredible house, the Greek mayor said: ‘You see that bridge over there?’
The Spaniard replied: ‘No.’
But it always saddens my heart that we insist on these stereotypes and hardly mention how other countries are "legally" siphoning taxpayer's money out to corporations by becoming tax havens and they're supposed to be a good example on how to handle taxpayer's money. The thing is, they're actually just better at stealing for their friends :)
Netherlands, I'm looking at you.
Maybe it's the education system? If it can't teach people how to spell, what hope if there for it to teach people how to govern?
plus not all infrastructure items are under the domain of the federal government so those dollars cannot be applied to some needs.
the only thing wrong with this countries government is that it is incredibly large for what it delivers and if you add in state, city, and local, governments it becomes even more absurd.
The I-35 bridge collapse was a couple of miles from my apartment at the time and occurred during a significant public debate in Minnesota about infrastructure spending. There was no "scare" about bridges - just a decade of underinvesting in infrastructure despite the warnings of the DOT and engineers about the increasingly poor condition of nearly every bridge in the State and complaints about how reduced budgets meant less time inspecting infrastructure.
Our Governor at the time (Pawlenty) was a notable opponent of government spending and had made significant cutbacks due to a "no new taxes" pledge and tax cuts (he had ambitions for higher office and unsuccessfully ran for President in 2012). Obviously Pawlenty wasn't directly responsible for the bridge collapse but our current Governor (Dayton) was elected partly due to promises to repair aging infrastructure (it was a major election issue).
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-minnesota-bonds-idUSKBN14O... "Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton unveiled a plan on Wednesday to fund a variety of infrastructure projects "vital" to the state's future with $1.5 billion of general obligation bonds. The proposal is slightly bigger than the $1.4 billion bonding plan he proposed a year ago to the Democrat-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House. A deal failed to materialize, leaving Minnesota without annual infrastructure funding. The Democratic governor could face a tougher battle this year as Republicans control both legislative chambers after winning a one-seat majority in the Senate in the Nov. 8 election."
I believe he is leaving office soon - it'll be interesting to see if infrastructure spending continues to be influential in the election. I'm surprised no one tried to tie the recently passed Sunday liquor sales with infrastructure spending! ;)
New infrastructure provides politicians with press and opportunities to pay off friends. It also provides an ongoing maintenance expense.
Maintenance is boring and expensive. Better to force yet another stadium through and leave the mess for the next pol.
...What are people going to use for a boogeyman once unions are finally extinguished?
The problem is really short term vs. long term thinking. Roads and bridges give immediate photo ops and help re-election chances. Fixing the damn does very little as long as it doesn't collapse while someone is in office.
So much harm has been done in the name of somebody not wanting small changes to happen. It's another form of short term vs. long term thinking. My city has done this for the past 50 years, and now the same people who fight any development tooth-and-nail are the ones who blame the city for abandoning them over the past 50 years in terms of putting in proper infrastructure.
The result of not growing infrastructure is that growth happens (people are having children!), but without proper infrastructure.
Even infrastructure bills like the one currently being proposed tend to worsen the maintenance deficit instead of improving it.
It's not quite the same as cutting maintenance budgets later, but it's a painful story of money going in up front without any respect for ongoing costs.
The long term v short term problem is still very real and unresolved though.
It also could be a problem of elected officials and public complacency. Not to be partisan, but one political party has staunchly opposed almost all government spending and has single-mindedly reduced taxpayer investment in everything they could.
That same party (maybe not the parent), as part of the campaign to reduce government activity, says government is unavoidably incompetent and blames that for all problems. Part of that is blaming "bureaucrats" (a bad word, apparently). Perhaps the problem is those elected officials.
In this case I don't know, but a LinkedIn post by someone I don't know, filled with hyperbole, is not credible evidence either way.
That's their public position but they actually did the opposite. Steering the money away from what's needed to special interests.
There have been massive cuts in large numbers of federal programs, and also at the state-level where the GOP has control.
The replacement, Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority, at least on the face of it, doesn't suck as bad: of 9 members, 5 must be engineers, 1 must be a civil engineer, and 1 must be a geologist. I'll take a technocrat over a bureaucrat any day.
I say that as someone in US Federal government. I see a lot of both. A bureaucrat can literally be some secretary who was around to apply for a job that "had to be filled", and there are only so many people in these cities to fill the jobs. Oh yes. Let that sink in. By comparison, technocrats are generally experts in their field, often sought after by the agency because they're forced to by a mandate, and to person, for whatever insane reason, was willing to take a massive pay cut to render some public service.
Not sure. Wouldn't a bump in canal traffic be good for the city?
I suppose, government IT might be a good example of that...
Competence is something of a mixed bag; I'd say the biggest problems aren't with technical competence of line staff but with government IT management and organization and policies imposed from outside of IT in government that constrain IT practices.
My sister and I are at similar career paths. She works as a principal engineer at a big software company. I work for a state .gov. She makes more, but my costs are well defined... no $10k health deductible, etc.
The present value of my pension is the equivalent to her performance stock grants, except they are near zero risk.
Incompetence is hardly limited to the public sector. I don't know anyone who works at a business who hasn't seen gross incompetence or waste/fraud (the local F500 companies near me have a horrible reputation for their IT departments and friends who have worked for them have many stories about "working lunches" that are expensed visits to a strip club etc). I've also seen plenty of consultants come into government agencies that have no clue what they are doing and are charging 3x the hourly rate of a FTE but the agency is forced to use them because of some arbitrary cap on headcount due to political reasons.
A whole generation is going to learn a bunch of lessons that have been forgotten, among them that infrastructure doesn't maintain itself. It's sad, because even in the best possible scenarios, a lot of the most helpless and disadvantaged are bound to suffer. At least with infrastructure failure at the level of dams, the destruction and death will be fairly democratic.
This is a really strange framing. A lot of my friends went into either environmental/civil engineering or local politics. They spend their days fighting tooth and nail for money and support to fix infrastructure that they know is crumbling, and they don't get it. There's nothing ignorant or generational about what they're doing.
If I were going to do the generation-warfare thing, my argument would be that younger people are more attuned to this problem because they're going to be around for every single collapse and catastrophe that's building up. They're just not in control of the money it would take to fix they problem, and had no chance to prevent it in the first place.
More broadly, though, this is better framed as a left/right struggle, or a bureaucrats/technicians struggle, or a politicians/citizens struggle, or virtually anything except a generational issue.
I think what led me to that was the idea that older generations have already seen infrastructure crises, so only younger ones would be learning something new. But I guess that's not really the case, is it? Has there been a major infrastructure crisis in the last ~100 years?
We haven't. People never learn lessons forever.
Frankly, the reality is often coming from the bureaucracy. We all chuckle about government absurdity, but many of the true experts in these areas are in these bureaucracies, and get silenced when their work conflicts with the narrative the political administration wants. As costs have grown in healthcare, public safety and other areas, other functions get starved of attention.
I will guarantee you that in all of these cases, people who know what they were talking about were advising about these issues or unable to do their jobs due to de-funding... especially when republicans have had their fingers in things.
We lost a lot when the postwar and 1960s generation aged out of the workforce. The folks in charge of government agencies in the 1960-2000 timeframe were better educated and more competent. The politicians, even the machine people, had a better fundamental respect for what government did and does.
I'll tell you from an anecdotal perspective that the people in my state who inspect dams and bridges give a shit about their jobs and are not complacent. I know a few people in each category. They have a frustrating job, but do it well.
Fast-forward 20 years, and there's no pattern to developments, meaning things are built without concern to infrastructure or services, plus lots of prime farmland has been lost (so much for the 'economic forward-thinking' of that 'business-friendly' government). It turns out that the government actually needs that knowledge, because the state government is now hiring back whatever surveyors they can find again from the old days, and at grossly inflated private contractor rates. They lost the expertise, the professionalism, and their value for money, all for short-term business thinking.
Not all government positions are filled with 'jobsworth' drones - there's a lot of vital stuff out there in ye olde bureaucracy.
I've thought for a while that the US suffers from not having a popular-media equivalent to Yes Minister. It's a great cultural touchstone for the idea of bureaucratic knowledge, and the danger of being politically or morally correct but unable to actually do things well.
It is whether the people who rise to the top and represent the bureaucracy to decision makers are reporting reality accurately, or telling decision makers what they want to hear.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink it. The same goes for accepting reality, hence why many choose to live in an alternative reality.
Obviously there are limits, chances are those limits are fairly well described and if they are ever exceeded it will be ugly.
If that's really the case, it's a pretty fucked-up situation. The expected outcome for a politician ignoring technical advice and people dying as a consequence is for the politician to be always blamed. Even when the technical advice was nonsense, what leads to a lot of different problems (including politicians working hard to silence technicians).
I can't imagine what kinds of problems make politicians able to shift the blame onto people that say the structure is not secure, but I'd start searching for corruption at the judiciary branch.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/dot_bridgereport15...
Not perfect, but they know what their problems are and have plans to fix. That means having people with a clue, listening to them, and funding remediation. Fortunately, they can fund it now. When I was growing up there in the 80's, things were falling apart.
Considering that they were busy killing people through poor design and lack of maintenance, I'd be interested in evidence of their superior competence.
Personally, I think they did a great job with the inferior engineering and safety science of the time but the results are better today.
The fundamental human problem is governance in the face of entropy and information overload.
Also known as the The Politics of Attention.
I'm still trying to understand the width and breadth of failure. Starting with Drucker's Managing in Turbulent Times thru Norman's Design of Everyday Things up to now's study of Why Smart People Do Stupid Things.
Sadly, I have no idea how to mitigate it.
A similar problem is going on with pensions. In many parts of the west, people were promised very comfy pensions. This presumed either a growing population or more productive economy, neither of which has happened in the proportion needed to pay the pensions. In the meantime, you get the occasional unfunded pension scandal. This will probably escalate, especially if the market comes down from what looks like a high level. Now and again it will become clear that people need to either keep working for longer or receive less generous benefits.
We don't seem to have any governance to solve this kind of problem. The people making the promises (elected officials) will be long gone by the time the dams break. On the private side, being inside a corporation doesn't seem to solve it either. The CEO who signed off the generous pensions will also be gone. And everyone can claim they acted in good faith, given the projections at the time the decisions were made.
It wouldn't have been a "30 ft. wall of water", it would have been half the reservoir volume as the failed emergency spillway "bedrock" quickly eroded.
And the emergency spillway failure mode wasn't because of age, it was a design flaw from the day the dam was built.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/17/oroville-dam-what-made...
The article also explains that cavitation caused the concrete to fail.
That is surprisingly thin. Plenty of concrete surface that you walk (not drive) on every single day is 6 or even 8 inches thick.
I'm sure it's within spec and built to fulfill their design, etc., but ... I would hardly call it "burly".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v98omCq1kRA
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2003-03/water-vapor-al...
Things that work on a laptop with the dev server don't work at scale, and you won't even understand the problems till you've had some theory/experience with the problems that scale adds.
You can land an A380 on a runway 17" thick...
This was definitely strong enough, just not ready to withstand cavitation and given that bronze ship screws suffer from it it is hard to see what kind of liner would have solved this problem entirely.
Solving it completely may ask for a totally different design, likely not a different material or thicker concrete.
Here's a more recent photo with humans standing near the broken concrete. You can see how massive that structure actually is (was?).
http://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/damage...
Here is one wit people for scale:
There's a bunch of great pictures on imgur with "humans for scale" https://imgur.com/gallery/mpUge
There's probably 20 Hoffman-crew-sized rented vehicles, and subcontracted employees and value-add diesel fuel ain't cheap either. It's going to take probably 9 months, at a minimum.
https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1811/58502/SES-Se...
This material will erode, but not so quickly that the main body of the lake wouldn't be shut off.
The "30 foot" figure is the depth of the water above this bedrock. Had the emergency spillway failed, this is what would have been released without any controls.
The main spillway was built on alluvium. I've posted elsewhere in the comment thread that cavitation was the primary cause of the concrete erosion.
Higher flows, like 100x higher, would have cut a deep channel where the emergency spillway was.
Compare this to the money the USA has pumped into the war against nonexistent WMD in Iraq, and you'll see that the Mosul Dam repairs amount to almost nothing in the US expenses "for Iraq". And nothing compared to the total US yearly budget.
So, what was your point again?
The military expenses are a fair point, but just another facet of the same underlying issue.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fif...
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09...