![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Aging infrastructure
I don't do bridges. However, deferred maintenance rules a lot of my projects. The pigeon loft? Roof leaks for several decades. As the guy in the ad said, "You can pay me now or pay me later." That building came within literal inches of collapse.
Various DOT engineers, state and federal, have been muttering for years about the age of the Interstate Highway System and "projected useful life." We started building those roads in the 1950s. Maine has just finished replacing a suspension bridge downriver from us, built in the 1930s, because strands in the suspension cables were breaking. They had to bar trucks and even large motor homes from crossing until the new span opened. Added over fifty miles to the route, upstream to the next bridge and back down again, on the only major coastal highway...
Roads, bridges, dams, water systems, you name it -- we need to spend billions of dollars each year just to hold entropy at bay. Red queen, running as fast as we can to stay in one place.
Instead, we have powerful senators "earmarking" new bridges to nowhere.
Various DOT engineers, state and federal, have been muttering for years about the age of the Interstate Highway System and "projected useful life." We started building those roads in the 1950s. Maine has just finished replacing a suspension bridge downriver from us, built in the 1930s, because strands in the suspension cables were breaking. They had to bar trucks and even large motor homes from crossing until the new span opened. Added over fifty miles to the route, upstream to the next bridge and back down again, on the only major coastal highway...
Roads, bridges, dams, water systems, you name it -- we need to spend billions of dollars each year just to hold entropy at bay. Red queen, running as fast as we can to stay in one place.
Instead, we have powerful senators "earmarking" new bridges to nowhere.
no subject
In that respect, Sim City was a stroke of genius. If you didn't set a high enough maintenance budget, you were toast.
I've encountered the 'not my problem' attitude when I pointed out that a leak in a roof was dripping water on the main beam of the roof.
Two years later, the beam had rotted to a considerable degree...
no subject
And no matter what the tax advisor said he got booed.
But to tie this in, deferred maintenance is disgusting in universities. One of the lecture halls i was in (underground no less) had a massive concrete beam running across the ceiling. Everytime it rained, it would leak. We look up and there's this beam with a massive crack through which the water is leaking.
We were in a comparative religion course. I think a lot of us found some religious aspect to pray to about that beam every class.
no subject
no subject
no subject