#us infrastructure

[thediktatortot]

There has got to be someone I can call or write an email to about the hair-pin turn that goes around our property corner and all the eight-wheeler come through this road.

There hasn't been a year of peace from accidents on that turn BECAUSE OF THE TRUCKS. They have hit people, fallen over, crashed and skidded off that corner almost 4-5 times a year over the last 5 years I've been here and it's driving me NUTS.

And yet? Nothing. They just replace the guard rail every time it happens and no one bothers to put a no trucks sign up on that section of road.

There has to be a company you can call to warn them about routes and dangerous turns for trucks.

[cock-holliday]

A place I used to live and work by had a pedestrian killed by a car recently and someone filming the vigil and speeches then panned over to show a car blocking the intersection

[callese]

[giuliawright]

Bridges

Every day, millions of trips are taken across structurally deficient bridges causing the need for updates to our bridge infrastructure maint

Excerpt from ASCE's 2021 Infrastructure Report Card:

There are more than 617,000 bridges across the United States. Currently, 42% of all bridges are at least 50 years old, and 46,154, or 7.5% of the nation’s bridges, are considered structurally deficient, meaning they are in “poor” condition. Unfortunately, 178 million trips are taken across these structurally deficient bridges every day. 

Note that a large portion of existing bridges have a ~50 year service lifespan!

[red-stick-progressive]

PG&E cuts power to a million people in California to prevent wildfires amid hot, windy weather

The move from California's biggest utility is the most sweeping effort in state history to prevent wildfires caused by windblown power lines

An imminent threat facing America is the decaying state of the Power Grid. This is the first instance on this scale of a climate change enhanced weather threat forcing a utility to put the power off due to the threat to the Grid, at least that I'm aware of. But expect it to become more common unless the government forces them to update and overhaul it with a huge stimulus, and then to force them to take better care of it.

The US Power Grid is arguably the largest machine on the planet, it's the oldest and largest power system of its kind. It's massive and because of its size and age it could fail catastrophically. We're beginning to see people and entities reacting to that reality without meaningfully trying to fix the root problem.

[thegikitiki]

Modern Water Supply, 1976 Illustration

[justsomeantifas]

As you can see from the yellow and red dots which indicate danger, the united states is covered in them. unsurprisingly theyre in some of the poorest areas of the united state. 

By 2020 85% of all dams in the united states will be past their life expectancy, and the dams which won’t be past their life expectancy don’t mean they’re safe, the vast majority of those dams are still not technologically advanced enough for our modern society, nearly all dams in the united states are hazardous when looking at this map. 

It doesn’t matter how solid a dam is down river from a high-hazard dam. If the high hazard dam fails it will wash out all the dams down river, which will flood even the low risk dams, and can cause failure. 

Dam repairs, and updates, and removal is expensive and dangerous, but necessary if we don’t want millions of people to lose their lives. 

[justsomeantifas]

Thanks to the governments continuous ignoring of our failing infrastructure here in the united states, what would have costed us 1.3 trillion to repair, will now cost us 4.59 trillion to repair, lmao which they totally aren’t going to do. So it’s just going to keep getting worse. If you control for inflation between 2001 and today, it still would have only cost us 1.65 trillion dollars. 8) We’re so fucked