America’s Falling Infrastructure

[unhappycamper]

America’s Falling Infrastructure
Corriere, Italy
By Alessandra Farkas
Translated By Slavomir Balsan
3 September 2010
Edited by Piotr Bielinski

NEW YORK - Nearly five months after the BP ecological disaster, and exactly five years after Hurricane Katrina, the explosion of another platform comes to sow panic in the Gulf of Mexico. Although the cause of the explosion remains unclear, once again America deals with the fragility of its infrastructure. Its bridges, highways, power plants and railways are more akin to those of a developing country than to that of a strategic and economic superpower.

Yesterday’s accident was the latest of a long series of disasters defined by a well-known Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, Bob Herbert, as “more human than natural,” and according to him, “New Orleans was lost for want of an adequate system of levees and floodwalls.”

The latest emergency dates back to August 23, when a fire, which broke out near the Jamaica station, in the New York district of Queens, paralyzed more than 100,000 commuters from the Long Island Rail Road for four hours, and created severe hardships for the whole week for another 600,000 users of the major railway line in the United States.

The list is endless, beginning with the explosion of the power plant in Middletown, Connecticut, that last February resulted in five dead and 27 wounded, to the snow of December 2009 that caused blackouts in Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Delaware, with extensive damages in North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

One of the tragedies still alive in the memory of the country is the collapse of Bridge 9340 which connects the two banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis; on August 1, 2007, 13 people were killed while 145 others were seriously injured.

[NJmaverick]

1. That's why our President is pushing for another $50 Billion to fix it