It's Not Just a Chinua Achebe Novel


Don't say you weren't warned:

Urban planning experts say America's older cities are modern-day Pompeiis - within range of volcanoes of infrastructure failures like New York's. On Wednesday, a pipe, laid in 1924, exploded near Grand Central station, killing one person and injuring 30. Maintaining a sewer system is hardly a sexy political issue, but years of funding neglect and a subsequent lack of maintenance nationwide have left many of the country's engineering systems unprepared to handle future stresses. "We have an aging infrastructure in this country, and we are not doing enough to maintain it and replace it," said Sarah Catz, director of the Center for Urban Infrastructure at University of California-Irvine. "What you saw happen in New York will happen in all types of infrastructures."

The issue is widespread, said Dan LeClair, who teaches city planning at Boston University. "It's not just pipes," he said. "It's bridges, it's roads, it's electrical systems, it's a variety of things that can happen in a man-made environment that can have a disastrous effect." A recent report by the Urban Land Institute determined that America's comparatively low investment in various transportation infrastructure - airports, public transit, railway systems, roads and bridges - has created an "emerging crisis." Of the 30 state transportation planning directors surveyed for the report, 25 said the nation's transportation infrastructure is incapable of meeting the nation's needs over the next decade.

Rarely does infrastructure fail as spectacularly as it did Wednesday, when plumes of smoke billowed as high as the 77-story Chrysler Building. Deterioration takes place slowly, and often, when something breaks down, the impact is minimal - for example, wisps of steam coming out of a city manhole due to a leaky pipe. Bill Miller, who worked for over 30 years as an administrative engineer with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, says the city tended to act only after the fact. "They respond to these systems when problems appear."

And that's just the physical infrastructure. Years of conservative myth-mongering about government has had a profound impact on the social environment in urban settings and even smaller cities. It's not a pretty picture.

In fact, I'd venture that the Keyboard Commandoes and basement warriors wouldn't have to go to Iraq to require donning some of Senator Vitter's favorite garments. They'd shit themselves quickly enough if they got caught in some of the "wrong" sections of almost any reasonably sized American municipality...sections that have been abandoned as thoroughly as New Orleans. Of course, what really makes this disgusting is the almost obscene levels of wealth this country has...

Wealth the wingnuts want all to themselves.

Oh--and you can bet the wingnut tune would change if it was THEIR neighborhood that needed fixing.