“4/08/2008, 11:18pm EST”
Infrastructure failing around the U.S. →
Catastrophic problems can arise when infrastructure fails. An 84-year-old steam pipe erupted beneath a New York street last year, creating a mammoth geyser that rained mud and debris down on the city.
In Chicago, an 80-year-old cast-iron water main broke earlier this year, spilling thousands of gallons and opening up a 25-foot hole in the street.
In Denver, up to 4 million gallons of water gushed from a ruptured 30-year-old pipeline in February, gouging a sinkhole across three lanes of Interstate 25. The lanes were shut down for nearly two weeks.
Cleveland has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure in the past 20 years but still must repair daily breaks. Last month, a break in a 2 1/2-foot-diameter water main turned a downtown square into a watery crater and knocked out other utilities.
The amount of wasted water from these breaches is staggering.
The 36 million gallons a day that leak from the 85-mile-long Delaware Aqueduct in New York state amounts to more than 1 billion gallons a month, enough to change the ecology of the area, say scientists from the Riverkeeper environmental watchdog group…
Utilities currently spend about $10.4 billion annually on large-scale repairs and improvements on drinking water infrastructure, a figure that has been relatively flat during the past two decades, the EPA said.
Isn’t it amazing how much time, effort, and material we put into the construction of our houses? Of our pipelines? Our roads? Bridges? Dams? Only to see them require frequent, expensive maintenance efforts just to exist?
When you fight nature, you’ve got to fight pretty damn hard — and sacrifice much — just to get to the next round. Maybe that’s because when we fight nature, as our culture implicitly and explicitly compels us to do, we also fight ourselves.
Never leave home without it.
