Experts warn U.S. is coming apart at the seams

By Chuck McCutcheon

Newhouse News Service

WASHINGTON — A pipeline shuts down in Alaska. Equipment failures disrupt air travel in Los Angeles. Electricity runs short at a spy agency in Maryland.

None of these recent events resulted from a natural disaster or terrorist attack, but they may as well have, some homeland security experts say. They worry that too little attention is paid to how fast the country's basic operating systems are deteriorating.

"When I see events like these, I become concerned that we've lost focus on the core operational functionality of the nation's infrastructure and are becoming a fragile nation, which is just as bad — if not worse — as being an insecure nation," said Christian Beckner, a Washington analyst who runs the respected Web site Homeland Security Watch (http://www.christianbeckner.com).

The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation "D" for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.

"I thought [Hurricane] Katrina was a hell of a wake-up call, but people are missing the alarm," said Casey Dinges, the society's managing director of external affairs.

British oil company BP announced this month that severe corrosion would close its Alaska pipelines for extensive repairs. Analysts say this may sideline some 200,000 barrels a day of production for several months.

Then an instrument landing system that guides arriving planes onto a runway at Los Angeles International Airport failed for the second time in a week, delaying flights.

Those incidents followed reports that the National Security Agency (NSA), the intelligence world's electronic eavesdropping arm, is consuming so much electricity at its headquarters outside Washington that it is in danger of exceeding its power supply.

"If a terrorist group were able to knock the NSA offline, or disrupt one of the nation's busiest airports, or shut down the most important oil pipeline in the nation, the impact would be perceived as devastating," Beckner said. "And yet we've essentially let these things happen — or almost happen — to ourselves."

The Commission on Public Infrastructure at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in a recent report that facilities are deteriorating "at an alarming rate."

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It noted that half the 257 locks operated by the Army Corps of Engineers on inland waterways are functionally obsolete, more than one-quarter of the nation's bridges are structurally deficient or obsolete, and $11 billion is needed annually to replace aging drinking-water facilities.

President Bush, asked about the problem during a public question-and-answer session in an April visit to Irvine, Calif., cited last year's enactment of a comprehensive law reauthorizing highway, transit and road-safety programs.

"Infrastructure is always a difficult issue," Bush acknowledged. "It's a federal responsibility and a state and local responsibility. And I, frankly, feel like we've upheld our responsibility at the federal level with the highway bill."

But experts say the law is riddled with some 5,000 "earmarks" for projects sought by members of Congress that do nothing to systematically address the problem.

"There's a growing understanding that these programs are at best inefficient and at worst corrupt," said Everett Ehrlich, executive director of the CSIS public infrastructure commission.

Ehrlich and others cite several reasons for the lack of action:

• The political system is geared to reacting to crises instead of averting them.

• Some politicians don't see infrastructure as a federal responsibility.

• And many problems are out of sight and — for the public — out of mind.

"You see bridges and roads and potholes, but so much else is hidden and taken for granted," said Dinges of the Society of Civil Engineers. "As a result, people just don't get stirred up and alarmed."

But a few politicians are starting to notice. In March, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., joined Sens. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Tom Carper, D-Del., in sponsoring a bill to set up a national commission to assess infrastructure needs.

That same month, the CSIS infrastructure commission issued a set of principles calling for increased spending, investments in new technologies and partnerships with business. Among those signing the report were Sens. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Chris Dodd, D-Conn.

"Infrastructure deficiencies will further erode our global competitiveness, but with the federal budget so committed to mandatory spending, it's unclear how we are going to deal with this challenge as we fall further and further behind in addressing these problems," Hagel said in a speech last year. "We need to think creatively."

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company

we're all going to die soon

hELL o mexican borders

Who's got the time to worry about shit like this when we've got gay marriage and abortion to deal with?

I'm sorry, but if you don't consider abortion and the social problems surrounding it as more important than a privately run oil company having a pipe go down and gas going up a couple pennies-a-gallon, then you have some serious issues.

Shit breaks. Shit deteriorates. Shit happens. Nothing lasts forever.

That's just how it goes and how it has always gone. This is just like neo-con terror "fear mongering." Despite popular belief. The country is not going to come apart at the seems.

But why wasn't any of the record billions upon billions in profits put into researching, examining, and starting repairs on the broken pipes? If I'm not mistaken, it was miles and miles of pipes that were broken and no one noticed. Maybe if the oil companies and the gov't would stop working so hard on gouging every last dime out of hard working people and put the money they make (I'm not against a business doing well with profits) the problems could of been prevented.

The problem isn't that things break. It's that people aren't fixing them, or maintaining them so that they don't break. And who gives a fuck if it's private? I actually expect MORE of a private company. You'd think that it would be in their best interests to maintain rather than repair breaks. But no, apparently it's more in their interests to shave a few bucks now while they can and leave the problems for teh NEXT CEO, just like the GOP leaves the problems of the budget and social security and the environment to the next generation. I know, I'm mixing public and private here, but we all know that it's the same folks running the corporations who are directing GOP policies, and obviously the same attitudes.

I mean, a person can only leave problems for their grandchildren to solve if they are completely morally bankrupt and have no belief in divine retribution.

And to think that Christians actually believe these people are on their side. THESE PEOPLE DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD, or they think that Armageddon is right around the corner, so fuck it!

Certainly no one in history has ever predicted this for America's future:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged

You guys are really over thinking this.

Here's what went into those pipes. There's a couple elements here. You have metallurgists, mechanical engineer's, and pipers that design it. This is a simple pipe. It doesn't matter how long it is, or how many pumping stations you have, the problem was within the pipes themselves. I don't care how hot the fluid was, how high the velocity of the flow was, or how much kinetic energy was going through it.

A pipe is a no fucking brainer when it comes to an engineering problem.

First, the metallurgist picked the materials. Material for the pipe, and the material for the seams. Then me, the mechanical engineer, I would design how it would go together. With something like this, you're looking at a factor of safety in all aspects of a project like this of three or four. That means, that the engineers come up with the most absolute wild scenario's for stress and strain, take that number, and multiply it by four and make the entire system according to that number. That way nothing ever happens to it.

This is a system that should have worked forever.

I absolutely, positively, gauran-fucking-tee you, that whatever contributed to deterioration of this pipe was some off the wall unforseen extraneous factor that wouldn't have mattered anyway.

It's not like engineers and the people that sign off on this shit half ass anything. No engineer half asses anything because if something goes wrong, we're out of a job. And whoever designed this was shit hot at what they did. Nobody puts their entire life on the line to cut corners. Nobody gets a job like that if they don't have a perfect twenty year long record.

This was an accident. And it wasn't EVEN an accident.

What's funny about your last comment David though, is that...you're sitting here saying that Christians believe the world is gonna end, yet...look who produced this bullshit fear mongering article that America is just falling apart at the seams.

I think I'm in the LW camp on this one.

There is no such thing as maintenance!

Go and get AIDS.

I didn't even leave any comments douchebag, I posted the article with the intention of being neutral. And the fact that civil engineers graded us a "D" for infrastructure might be something of concern that is worth looking into. You're the one that's acting like you know everything. Also, notice how I haven't mentioned George Bush once, fucko.

how in the fuck you arent banned yet is beyond me

Same to you man

There's a BIG difference between thinking the world is going to shit (preventable by humans) and thinking the world is going to END (Jeebus be comin to take um home). If you think Jeebus be comin, there's no reason to fix the preventable stuff.

Are you okay?

Nothing in this thread was even addressed to you.



I'm sorry, but there's really nothing you can do for a problem like that. Once you seal something like a piping system up, it's sealed. It is expected to have quite a long life span.

A good example would be your engine block. Do you open up your engine block to make sure everything is okay? Nope. You let your engine block and all its internal workings do their thing until the bitch dies. You blow a major engine gasket, you burn out a piston, bust a control rod, something like that. You don't take apart your engine block until it breaks because it's just like a piping system. It is expected to last forever, or it has an expected life-span. That's the way a lot of engineering shit works. You design it for "infinite life."

Tell, how do you suppose you maintain a piping system like that?

"Hey chuck, get out your torch and cut a big ass hole right here!"

I think the theme of the article goes beyond just the one oil pipeline. Similiar problems have happened with many major infrastructure projects in the last deceade or so; the "Big Dig" or the Denver airport for example. What makes the pipeline significant is that it's failure was not the direct result of the imperial federal government f**king up, this time it was a private company.

As for engineers, my experience is different than yours. I worked for five years for one of the largest government contracting enigeering companies and the process goes something like this:

1.) get your best business people to write up the bid, making it low in the first few years even if you are running at a loss

2.) get your best engineers into the design phase

3.) work in the second tier engineers and up and comers.

4.) move your best people onto the next project, promote the second tier folks so they feel loyal to the project.

5.) now play "pass the trash". Once the contract is up and running and the customer has bought off, switch your crappy people and new college hires to the project. They cost less and you can work them harder than the talented people. Mostly because it takes them 2x as long to do anything.

infra-structure is way more important than abortion discussion. Without a good infra-structure everything becomes less productive, more expensive,etc.