While we we're gearing up to talk about "Top Secret America," shall we agonize briefly over falling bridges and bursting dams?

Bridges falling? Dams bursting? Well, it gets your mind off the national-security state we're apparently turning into, doesn't it?

by Ken

I'm still struggling to digest last week's already-classic Washington Post series "Top Secret America," about which I'm now projecting a two-part series:

* "Top Secret America": (1) Why you absolutely have to read the WaPo series

* "Top Secret America": (2) Why you'd be totally nuts to read the WaPo series

I think there are reasons why it's important that everyone read the series, and reasons why you should have your head examined if you're even contemplating doing so. This is a subject that's bound to drive sensible people nuts. I mean, when even as smart a fellow as The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg goes a little goofy -- in his "Comment" piece, "Open Secrets," in the new (Aug. 2) issue -- what hope is there for the rest of us?

The two sides of the equation result, I think, from the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of confronting problems so enormous that (a) we don't dare ignore them, and (b) we have no earthly way of dealing with them.

And let's face it, our system of public discourse is ideally suited to paying lip service to dealing with such weighty matters while making sure we never do, actually. And from here it's just a tiny hop to the wonderful world of our decaying infrastructure. Oh yes, I hear those groans. Oh no, not the [expletive deleted] I-word! Please, can't we talk more about Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann?

We can, and I'm sure we will. But just this once, can't we talk about, say, bridges all over the country crumbling beneath our wheels? It so happens that Scholars & Rogues' Dr. Denny recently did a powerful post on the subject, piquantly titled "Drive with care over those 151,394 obsolete, unsafe bridges." I've been meaning for days now to write about it, and I think this might be a good time just to introduce the subject.

Here's how Dr. D sets the stage:

Each day that I drive the 11 miles from my house to the university, I cross nine of America’s 601,396 bridges (as of 2008). Those nine are not likely to collapse. I have seen each replaced or rehabilitated in the last 10 years.

But you may not be as fortunate. You may need to drive across one or more of the 151,394 bridges the federal Department of Transportation lists as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. That’s 25 percent of American bridges. But fear not: Bridges are becoming safer. There were 3,930 fewer such bridges in the United States in 2008 than in 2007.

Whew. That’s a relief. At this rate, America will have no unsafe or obsolete bridges in only 153 years.

The repair and replacement rate of deficient or obsolete U.S. bridges is rising, however. According to DOT statistics, the number of lousy bridges has been reduced by 14,087 since 2000, an average of only 1,565 a year. So maybe (you remember, of course, all that talk about those shovel-ready stimulus projects?) that repair rate will increase, and we will have licked our bad bridge problem in only 100 years.

That’s assuming, of course, Congress will shell out enough money to fix them, either in 10 years or 100 years. . . .

Funny man! We all know that the only time it's possible to attract any attention to crumbling-infrastructure issues is when the crumbling momentarily turns catastrophically violent, and that attention lasts only as long as our collective memory of, say, that last bridge collapse, which is to say, a little longer locally than elsewhere, and not all that long anywhere.

Dr. D quotes this assessment by the American Society of Civil Engineers:

Simply maintaining the current overall level of bridge conditions—that is, not allowing the backlog of deficient bridges to grow—would require a combined investment from the public and private sectors of $650 billion over 50 years, according to AASHTO, for an average annual investment level of $13 billion. The cost of eliminating all existing bridge deficiencies as they arise over the next 50 years is estimated at $850 billion in 2006 dollars, equating to an average annual investment of $17 billion. [emphasis added]

According to Dr. D's estimate, the federal Highway Bridge Program had a budget that averaged, for the period 2005-09 just over $4 billion a year.

Now, we should probably talk more about the falling-down-bridge problem, not to mention this national-security-state business. Meanwhile Dr. Denny has gone and stirred up more trouble. Now he's whining about, ferchrissakes, dams going kaput, in a post called "The nation’s 120,000 dams: Much more inspection, repair needed." Imagine, just because a couple of dams failed in the space of a few days.

As Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin sang solo in the nearby Dodge Theatre, 750 million gallons of water from the 16-foot-deep Tempe Town Lake near Phoenix roared through a burst dam at up to 15,000 cubic feet per second. Fortunately, no one died; no significant property damage occurred.

Eight dam sections made of inflatable rubber constrained the lake, four at each end. The $4.4 million dam began receiving water from the Central Arizona Project in 1999. In 2002, one of the 40-foot-long, foot-thick rubber bladders (covered by a 10-year warranty from Bridgestone Industrial Products) failed, requiring a repair. Tempe and Bridgestone officials have disagreed on how to prevent deflation and enlarging buffer zones around the dam. UPI reported that “[a] design flaw made it impossible to use sprinklers to keep the rubber cool and wet, which likely hastened its deterioration.” Also, said UPI:

Mayor Hugh Hallman told the Arizona Republic that work had been scheduled to start Wednesday on replacing the dam. He added the maintenance crew could have been killed if the collapse had occurred while the work was under way.

This dam was small and young. The average age of tens of thousands of dams tracked by a national database is 51 years old. Because state and federal budgets are fiscally challenged, dams in America are not inspected as often as law and common sense requires. That must change.

Dams have many often overlapping functions — flood control, water supply, irrigation, hydroelectric power, and recreation. They may also restrain materials other than water, such as tailings and mining slurries. Because they are static structures often in place for decades, we give little thought or budgetary attention to their potential for failure.

But, although failure is rare, such events represent extraordinary risk to life and property. On Saturday, the dam holding back 10-mile-long Lake Delhi in eastern Iowa failed, abetted by 15 inches of rain in 48 hours. Two years ago, repeated flooding had done an estimated $500,000 damage to this 83-year-old earthen dam. The latest flooding caused a breach about 125 feet wide and 40 feet deep, officials said. About 8,000 people were affected downstream with considerable property damage, officials said, but no deaths or injuries were reported.

This dam, like the majority of dams in the United States, was not owned by a government. A recreation association and a hydroelectric dam owned it. In 2008, the state of Iowa had 3,325 dams, of which 276 had high or significant damage potential. Iowa had the equivalent of 1.25 dam inspectors, operating with a budget of $20,000. But residents and businesses downstream of Lake Delhi could easily confirm whether the dam was listed as one with such damage potential.

The National Inventory of Dams, maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, contains more than 85,000 dams. The inventory is limited to dams of high or significant hazard that would result in loss of life or significant property damage in the event of failure. . . .

And so on and so on. We get the idea. Now along with the bridges falling, the dams are going boom. Fair enough, we ought to be able to give that a good two or three minutes' worth of attention. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand . . . .

Now do you see what we've done here? We've changed the subject. At this very moment you're not even thinking about "Top Secret America," are you? You're thinking about those bridges and dams in your neck of the woods, aren't you? (God only knows what Dr. Denny will be carrying on about next week.)

So tomorrow, to get your mind off falling bridges and exploding dams, what do you say we talk a little about this business of the U.S. turning into a national-security state?

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