A brush with our nation's crumbling infrastructure

At least it wasn't a fatal encounter, as it was for the people in Minneapolis who didn't survive to tell their crumbling infrastructure story.

It rained all night and I went to bed hoping the basement wouldn't take on too much water.  Nights like that I have serious buyer's remorse.  Remorse that I didn't buy a boat.  At about 1:30, I woke to the sound of my neighborhood transformer blowing.  It's in my backyard, so it's hard to sleep through the conflagration that occurs almost any time it rains for more than hour, any time it snows more than an inch, any time the wind blows much, and sometimes when an errant sparrow flies by and farts in its general direction.  It is a very sensitive little transformer. 

So, after the transformer blew, I lay in bed, trying to convince the cats that despite the explosion and the bright lights and the cascading sparks, that we were not in fact about to be killed by terrorists.  The electricity was out, naturally, so I also lay awake wondering how badly the basement would flood if it kept raining and the sump pumps didn't have power. 

I had just started to drift back to sleep when I heard a man say, "Is that a toilet?"

Why, yes, yes it is.

outhouse

Because the transformer is mounted on a pole in my backyard, when it goes kablooey, the city workers tromp through my yard to investigate.  Often they wait until morning, and sometimes I actually sleep through their work, but not that night.  It would have been hard to sleep through four massive trucks parked in front of my house and one in my drive and about seven guys in full-body rain slickers with halogen headlamps arguing outside my bedroom window.  It was like something out of E.T.

Close_encounter

leaning tower of zap OMG!

Then the city workers began to drill and hammer and generally run whatever noisy power tools they could get their hands on.  All of that, however, wasn't the best part.  The highlight was this snippet of conversation I overheard:

Pole Guy #1: I don't know where you think I'm going to bolt that L-bracket.  About half this pole is rotten.
Pole Guy #2: It shoulda been replaced ten years ago.
Ground Guy #1: Yeah, well, considering there's no money for maintenance, it's probably not going to be replaced for another ten years.
Ground Guy #2 (laughing): or until it falls down.

In my backyard.  Until it falls down in my backyard.  In the middle of some wretched winter ice storm and takes out the electricity of three city blocks.  So, that's where we are.  Not just big, headline-worthy catastrophes caused by a failure to perform maintenance on bridges, but a nationwide, localized failure to perform every kind of maintenance on our infrastructure.

When I was in college, I had a friend who had grown up in Lebanon and we were once stuck together during an ice storm in Manhattan, Kansas.  The power was out for five days and we were miserably cold and hungry.  On about the third day, Nadal said, "You know what makes America great?"  Don't laugh, but at the time--1992--I answered: "Our Bill of Rights?" (Little did I know...)  Nadal said, "No, it's that even the poorest people in America can get running water and electricity 24 hours a day, every day of the year.  Oh, sure, it's out now because of the storm, but it'll come back on and it'll stay on.  We never had that in Lebanon."

At the time, I thought she was being funny, but sometimes I look back and agree with her.  One of the things that made us great was the notion that we were all in it together and we were all going to sink or swim together.  We were all going have lights and water and good roads and decent schools.  I don't feel like that's a sure thing anymore.  I feel like as the infrastructure falls apart, as we keep giving tax breaks to corporations and rich people, as we keep wasting money of wars and military technology, we may enter a new era when the electricity and the water and the good roads aren't a given.

The answer is fairly simple: it's the FUCKING TAXES, STUPID.  If we don't tax the citizens appropriately, we don't have enough money in the coffers to pay for repairs to things like bridges and electrical grids.  That's exactly what we've been failing to do for years.  After the initial outlay to build all the metropolitan water systems and a national electric grid and an interstate system, we just stopped allocating tax money to maintain it.  Like buying a million dollar house and then refusing to repair the rain gutters until your whole roof falls apart. 

What do the anti-tax people think?  That the Infrastructure Fairy is just going to pop by and drop off a few billion dollars?  Or do they think that all this free market enterprise is going to magically produce companies that will dip into their profits to maintain infrastructure, out of the goodness of their hearts? 

And that, my people, is part of the conversation I'll be having with my city commissioner just as soon as he calls me back.