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The Race to Restore American's Infrastructure - A CNBC Original Series

May 11, 2012 at 10:52 AM by Envista

America's infrastructure is crumbling with potentially deadly consequences.  CNBC reveals how our nation's bridges, road and pipelines are in desperate need of repair and searches for solutions to the crisis.

About the Show

Infrastructure is defined as “the underlying foundation or basic framework of a system or organization.” In the United States, those systems, the backbones of our highways, bridges, levees, power grids and pipelines are crumbling. The American Society of Civil Engineers has given our nation’s infrastructure a near failing grade of “D” overall. Trillions may be needed to rebuild critical public infrastructure. If not, more catastrophic failures similar to the Minneapolis I-35W Bridge Collapse in 2007 and the San Bruno, Calif., gas transmission line explosion in September of 2010 could occur.

In the CNBC Original Production “Race To Rebuild: America’s Infrastructure,” Michelle Caruso-Cabrera takes viewers inside the infrastructure problem and asks the experts and policy makers what’s being done to put the nation back on track. Should the private sector be enlisted to help rebuild failing infrastructure? Will President Obama’s proposed $50 billion in funding for fixing roads, bridges, rail lines and airports be enough? “Race to Rebuild: America’s Infrastructure” searches for innovative answers to a national crisis.

We invite your comments.

Watch the Full Episode Here

A new approach to infrastructure

April 11, 2012 at 1:08 PM by envista

As seen in Smart Shift/Executive/Financial Post

ISSUE: Canadian cities need to replace their aging infrastructure to accommodate new weather patterns, shifting demographics and social trends

SHIFT: Collaborative planning that transcends municipal departments and develops a holistic approach to emerging challenges is putting a new spin on infrastructure development

The Baby Boom did more than create an aging and overabundant population. It generated the birth of often hastily established municipal infrastructure that has long been showing its age.

Today’s infrastructure is no longer up to the task of handling population growth, urban intensification and climate change. For the most part, experts say, it is outdated, overburdened and too “heavy” for the 21st century world.

“The infrastructure model was developed from ideas that date back to the 19th century, were pioneered in the 1920s and didn’t come into use until the 1950s,” says Luigi Ferrara, director of the Centre for Arts & Design at George Brown College in Toronto.

At the time it was all about spreading out neighbourhoods and creating zones for industry and commercial activities, with a few parks thrown into the mix, he says. “What we are building is simply too heavy for this society to bear and not allowing us to go forward.”

Even the economics are at a standstill, according to Dr. Robert MacDermid, associate professor of political science at York University in Toronto. “Now that we’ve built out, there is no more money to be made from development charges. And the sewers and water systems put in place 50 years ago did not anticipate the growth we’ve experienced in urban areas. Everything is destined to be extremely costly.”

The suburbs are as problematic as urban centres, says Larry Beasley, founding principal of Beasley and Associates in Vancouver and former director of planning for Vancouver. “Standards are outdated and infrastructure has not been targeted for sustainable performance in terms of energy, water and waste management. It’s a combination of the wrong capacity, the wrong technologies and the wrong performance objectives. On top of that, municipalities are facing burgeoning infrastructure costs and no way to pay for it.”

AWWA Report on Infrastructure: Buried No Longer $1T to address infrastructure needs

March 1, 2012 at 2:33 PM by envista

Read about AWWA's Feb. 28 testimony before Congress on innovative financing for water infrastructure. 

Infrastructure: Buried No Longer 

The massive investment needed for buried drinking water infrastructure in the United States totals more than $1 trillion between now and 2035.  

The need will double from roughly $13 billion a year today to almost $30 billion (in 2010 dollars) annually by the 2040s, and the cost will be met primarily through higher water bills and local fees, according to a new AWWA report. 

"Buried No Longer: Confronting America's Water Infrastructure Challenge" is a call to action for utilities, consumers and policy makers and recognizes that the need to replace pipe in the ground "puts a growing stress on communities that will continue to increase for decades to come." 

The new report includes more than 35 tables and graphs detailing information by region and utility size.

Key findings in "Buried No Longer" include:

• The needs are large. The cost of replacing pipes at the end of their useful lives will total more than $1 trillion nationwide between 2011 and 2035 and exceed $1.7 trillion by 2050.
• Household water bills will go up. Although water bills will vary by community size and geographic region, for some communities the infrastructure costs alone could triple the size of a typical family's bill.
• There are important regional differences. The growing national needs affects different regions in different ways, with growth concerns greater in the South and West and replacement concerns greater in the Northeast and Midwest.
• There are important differences based on system size. As with many other costs, small communities with fewer people to share in the costs face the biggest challenge.
• The costs keep coming. Infrastructure renewal investments are likely to be incurred each year over several decades. For that reason, many utilities may choose to finance infrastructure replacement on a "pay-as-you-go" basis rather than through debt financing.
• Postponing investment only makes the problem worse. Postponing infrastructure investment in the near-term would raise the overall cost and increase the likelihood of water main breaks and other infrastructure failures.

America's Aging Infrastructure: What to Fix, and Who Will Pay?

February 15, 2012 at 2:11 PM by envista

Published in Knowledge@Wharton

In the U.S., infrastructure is usually silent and forgotten -- until the power goes off, the ATM stops working or a neighborhood is consumed by fire. In September, for reasons still unknown, a

54-year-old gas pipeline blew up in San Bruno, Calif., killing eight people and damaging or destroying more than 50 homes. Seven weeks earlier, a 41-year-old oil pipeline ruptured in Michigan and

spilled more than a million gallons of crude into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. After a catastrophe, questions fly: How could this happen? Why wasn't the equipment upgraded? What if things keep falling apart?

Tragedies such as the ones in California and Michigan also raise a broader question, says Erwann Michel-Kerjan, managing director of Wharton's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. "Is America ready for the 21st century?" he asks. "The answer is no."

Most experts agree that America's infrastructure needs an upgrade. Some say it needs a complete re-think.

Why Does Our Infrastructure Resemble a Third World Country’s?

February 1, 2012 at 3:10 PM by envista

Excerpt of article on governing.com

Another significant reason for so much crumbling infrastructure is our fractured political economy, where lines of authority are unclear. City hall may be nominally in charge of city streets, but on a day-to-day basis, private utility companies for phone, gas, electric, cable and Internet service are the ones tearing up the streets. Not being in the road business, their repair jobs aren’t always the best. Sometimes such companies will tear up a street immediately after it has been resurfaced, because coordination between private and public departments is difficult.

Read the full story