Dear Editor:

That narrowly-averted “catastrophic failure” faced by the Queensboro Bridge in the late 1970s (The Story of this Country’s Bridges spans History, Feb. 18 Beacon) could soon be the fate of many of America’s bridges and much of our other infrastructure as well.

More than 26 percent, or one in four, of the nation’s bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, according to a 2009 study of our country’s infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which gave the bridges’ health an overall grade of C. TheC, meaning mediocre, given to the U.S.’s bridges actually wasn’t that bad when compared to how other parts of our infrastructure fared on the ASCE’s report card. Grades of D or D-minus, meaning “poor” and close to “failing,” were given to some rather vital public concerns like dams, aviation, hazardous waste treatment, levees, roads and mass transit. Our drinking water and waste water systems both garnered D-minuses from the engineers’ group, which reported that “aging systems discharge billions of gallons of untreated wastewater into U.S. surface waters each year.” Dirty water eventually translates into outbreaks of cholera and other deadly epidemics. In short, the ASCE report estimates that America needs to spend $2.2 trillion over five years to restore our infrastructure to a healthy, sound 21st century condition.

While President Barrack Obama’s $780 billion economic stimulus package made some small steps towards rebuilding our infrastructure, it was not nearly enough. And, unfortunately, Obama and way too many of our other political representatives have other so-called priorities that apparently trump things like public safety and health. There was, for instance, that multi-trillion dollar bailout of the Wall Street casino barons, who then used much of that taxpayer largesse to make more mergers, pay themselves obscenely fat bonuses and resume the same high-risk market gambling that created the financial crisis in the first place. Then, of course, there’s our ridiculously bloated $680 billion military budget for 2010. It includes another $130 billion for the seemingly endless carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What a shame that the magnificent American bridges referred to in engineer Henry Hessing’s Beacon essay are now, in their growing decreptitude, becoming a symbol of 21st century America’s apparent decline and can’t-do spirit.

As New York Times columnist Bob Hebert summed it up in his Feb. 16 What’s Wrong With Us piece, “Ignoring (infrastructure) problems imperils public safety, diminishes our economic competitiveness, is penny-wise and pound-foolish, and results in tremendous missed opportunities to create new jobs on a vast scale.”

Kevin O’Neill

West Babylon

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