Posted on 09/21/2012 11:53:24 PM PDT by LucyT
You can tell a lot about a nation by the condition of the infrastructure. So what does our infrastructure say about us? It says that we are in a very advanced state of decay. At this point, much of America is being held together with spit, duct tape and prayers.
Our roads are crumbling and thousands of our bridges look like they could collapse at any moment. Our power grid is ancient and over a trillion gallons of untreated sewage is leaking from our aging sewer systems each year. Our airports and our seaports are clogged with far more traffic than they were ever designed to carry.
Approximately a third of all of the dam failures that have taken place in the United States since 1874 have happened during the past decade. Our national parks and recreation areas have been terribly neglected and our railroads are a bad joke. "...drinking water systems all over the country are badly outdated.
While the Obama administration is spending more than half a million dollars to figure out why chimpanzees throw poop, our national infrastructure is literally falling apart all around us.
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(Excerpt) Read more at theeconomiccollapseblog.com ...
. . . . List of facts 21 shown at the link.
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“. . . . List of facts 21 shown at the link.”
Wait...aren’t these “shovel ready jobs” that need to be done?
What we as a nation need to do is send a zillion dollars to Democrat labor unions to fix everything.
Unions, unions, unions..
All of the highways in and around Detroit look like they’ve been used by the air force for target practice. The worst is between Detroit and Toledo.
That’s because LIBERALS have been ruling forever. The money was obviously spent on other things.
We don’t do sewers any more, we do pensions.
With a constant flow of new citizens and voters, there is no continuity to public consciousness and discourse, to make politicians pay for the gradual decay and lower standards.
I thought it was the gangs or the fact that your state allows some very heavy trucks to travel your roadways.
Our airports are jammed -— with flights that are priced out assuming that half of the cabin will be empty seats.
Our bridges are crumbling, yes, while bridge authorities are being crushed with public pensions that no one can afford and repair plans are held up in endless environmental impact studies and traffic studies.
The dams bursting from having to bear capacity levels they were never designed for due to the tearing down of so many dams and ill-thought bypass schemes to preserve particular fish stocks.
America isn't crumbling, it is being crushed by greedy public employees and those who view an ideal world where you wake up in the morning to work all day in the field to gather the vegetarian home grown from the family gardens, with breaks to attend public reeducation and a hefty tithe to those more equal who tend the public square.
What they don't understand is that America is built out of granite that has been soaked with the blood of their ancestors - through wars and tribulations. Their crushing burden is trying hard to break that foundation, but it won't work. They try every day to extend it, just a little further, but they are hitting the point where their pressure is yielding little more.
The age of the liberal is coming to a close, and you can hear the panic in their voices as they realize it, hoping to grab on to just a bit more before the inevitable tide turns against them.
You mean all the heads that need to be whacked with a shovel?
Over the past ten years Egypt has received 15 to 20 BILLION dollars from the U.S.
That would have paid for a few roads and sewers here.
When I was an ironworker in NYC, my partner for three years was a black guy named Richard who liked to be called Rikki. We became very good friends, I would say like brothers. I was the Best Man at his wedding.
Eventually we got split-up, he went to do repair work on the Queensboro Bridge and I got sent to repair the Whitestone Bridge. On the Whitestone Bridge we hung two cables parallel underneath the bridge and tied down a section of scaffold between them. Then we stood on that and used air powered “hell dogs” (which are like small version jackhammers you hold like a shotgun) to bang out the old rusty rivets and replace them with new bolts.
On Rikki’s job, they had a wide platform that was moved into position underneath the bridge by a crane operator. I used to joke to Rikki about “how good you Queens have it over at Queensboro Bridge with your fancy expensive platform and crane operator, while we are hanging a section of scaffold under the Whitestone Bridge.”
But on day the setting of the platform on the Queensboro Bridge went wrong and the platform quickly folded which caused the instant death of one ironworker, who was the new partner of Rikki.
The dead ironworker slipped out of his safety harness but Rikki was able to grab him so he wouldn’t fall from the bridge. It took a few hours for the rescue, while Rikki kept hold of the dead ironworker. Afterwards Rikki was hailed as a Hero in the national press for his actions.
I saw this same panic crap written in the 1970’s, and 80’s and 90’s, etc.
Things age, esp. thru use. More people, more use. No shit Sherlock.
I have seen some improvements in major roads in New England where signs used to say “Use at own risk” (Thank you Democrats for posting these in your ruined states).
Pisspoor transportation planning is responsible for a lot of our mess. In 1975 I had to do a paper for my Criminal Justice course on “solving traffic problems in No. Virginia”.
After travelling around the area, the answer was readily apparent, “More money, unified regional planning (which did not exist, but does now)”.
I can only recall one major bridge collapse in the recent past, that in Minnesota, which was due to a design flaw.
Aged and over-used sewage facilities are the fault of the city/towns, etc. that use them. I know because I worked on one such case for the govt. Again, Democrats control most of these cities and counties, like mine, which spend more money on “Parks, recreation centers and buying non-existent land” than on the water/sewage problems.
Illegal immigrants have drained our local govt treasuries to the point that legal citizens cannot get social services or roads fixed, and we are taxed to death, again, mainly by dominate Democrat-dominated city councils, etc. But we get damned green traffic isles which endanger us when we try to come out from our streets into traffic. My daughter just blew two tires turning into our street because the idiots who made the isles failed to get it properly lighted so that you could see it at night.
For all the PhDs we have in America, you would think that a few would have the common sense and skills to solve many of our problems, but, no, we get failing wind power, political payoffs to the totally failed “green/wind/solar power” industries (all major projects funded by the Obama regime have failed to the tune of over tens of Billions of DOLLARS, including Solydra, etc).
The “ROT” is actually in DC, in the White House, with its marxist czars, environmental wackos, and a do-nothing Senate. Don’t even mention the marxist-led EPA. Almost useless because of horrible leadership that was trained under avowed marxist leader Carol Browner (now led by her protege’ Lisa Jackson).
Chu, at the Dept. of Energy is useless and clueless.
Dept. of Agriculture is going to starve America by limiting certain types of farming.
Dept. of Transportation is going to cripple the long-hold truckers who use diesel fuel by imposing impossible mileage and fumes regulations. The same for trains who use diesel fuel. Coming to ships, also.
These idiots are also going to limit transportation forms by imposing unrealistic restrictions on “greenhouse gases”, i.e. the Carbon Dioxide you exhale every day.
Welcome to the Democrat’s version of HELL.
If we don’t wake up on Nov. 6th, crumbling infrastructure will be the least of our problems.
Illegals don’t need roads to overrun our country.
Drug traffickers don’t need roads to deliver their drugs, nor do they need arms thanks to Att. Gen. Eric Holder and his band of total incompetents.
I could go on for years but we don’t have years, or even more than a couple months before America decides which way we go. “Save the Snail Darter Fish or save American jobs”.
There is a CHOICE and we had better make the right one, or all of this discussion is academic.
That right there is tagline material.
Actually, socialists, right or left, fully plan to reduce the population of the earth to about 500 million....probably 99% workers and 1% elite.....it takes very few people to control the rest when there are no weapons in the hands of the workers and the 99% are held to an agrarian life.
Here in NJ the secondary roads and small streets are falling apart; “stop” signs are overgrown with foliage (!) since public works employees have been laid off (to maximize the number of public school teachers on the dole), and there is no money left to fix anything.
Governor Christie’s property tax cap has ensured that this won’t improve any time soon, but I’d still prefer to live in a state that is run-down than to lose my house because my property tax bill increases $1K annually.
Whitestone Bridge - in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, travelled across that bridge many times with parents as a kid to get from Long Island to my grandparents in Manhattan - on Dykeman St. (200th St) at the time.
My Norwegian father-in-law (never knew him) worked on the Empire State and other buildings, along with NY Indians. They were 2 of the ethnics who easily worked at heights.
He had no accidents.
So, thank you, Ironworker!
Longevity of bridges is a mystery to me - I get to thinking about that occasionally. Thinking of all the daily traffic and their weight - how much can a bridge take?!
And to double-deck the George Washington Bridge - astounds me.
Well, living in Southern CA for 43 years.
And only occasionally now do I find myself on those 3 or 4 criss-crossing stacked freeway exchanges - and thinking EARTHQUAKES!
Ryan stated that only 6 percent of the stimulous money for “infrastructure and shovel ready” were allocated, WHERE IS THE REST OF THE 96 PERCENT?
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