Regional Insights: Regional solution needed for ailing infrastructure
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There's a part of the Pittsburgh region that's getting older and sicker every day, and it's not our senior citizens. It's our infrastructure.
Adequate and reliable water lines, sewer systems, stormwater systems, roads, bridges, transit systems, airports, locks and dams, industrial sites and buildings, and many other physical systems are critical if our citizens and businesses are to have clean water to drink, the ability to travel to work, the ability to ship and receive products, etc. Yet many of those systems in southwestern Pennsylvania are either wearing out or unable to deal with demands they were not designed for.
You can see the effects of this in the news on a regular basis. People drowning when storm runoff floods streets. Bridges collapsing or being closed. Tainted drinking water supplies and unhealthy levels of sewage in the rivers. Barges backing up in the rivers due to broken locks.
We're not alone in having problems with aging and under-capacity infrastructure. It's a national problem, and it's particularly bad in older regions in the Northeast and Midwest like ours.
But in many ways, our problems are worse than those in almost any other region. For example, we have one of the worst problems of sewage-contaminated water in the nation due to urban sewage overflows and failing rural septic tanks. And in transportation, not only do we have more bridges than almost any region of the country, more than one-fourth of our bridges are structurally deficient, more than double the national average.
Despite the severity and importance of these problems, we're not aggressively modernizing our infrastructure. At best we're doing a portion of the needed preventive maintenance and replacing things only after they collapse completely. Every year that we avoid more fundamental solutions, the problem will just get worse. Thanks to years of deferring the problems, we now have a multibillion-dollar backlog of important projects.
Many people have looked to the federal government to solve our infrastructure problems. Earlier this year, a bipartisan national group called Building America's Future issued yet another call for increased federal investment in infrastructure.
First Published October 2, 2011 12:00 am
