Things fall apart: Nation must get serious about fixing our crumbling infrastructure
The Charleston Gazette
Donald W. Lyons
May 4, 2008
Our population is growing. Our kids are having or will have more kids. We need additional infrastructure for them and for us. We can ignore the danger signs of overloading our highways, water supply, sewage treatment, electric power and other infrastructure until it is too late to prevent overload and failures that cause major harm to all of us. We need to act with a sense of urgency and do something to break the gridlock over improvements - not only in West Virginia but nationally.
The delays in building new infrastructures are not just hypothetical. Consider how difficult it is to get anything built, whether it is a road, an electricity transmission system or a new power plant. No matter how badly needed and worthwhile the project and how many construction jobs and permanent jobs it will create and tax revenue it will generate when local dissent builds, we often back down. All too often large projects have been denied construction permits or abandoned when there's conflict.
The lack of political will to upgrade and expand our nation's network of electric transmission lines is a prime example. We don't hear about blackouts as often as we hear about airplane emergency landings or crashes, but they occur a few times each year, with costly consequences. If solutions to congestion in the electrical grid are not reached, we heighten the risk of unraveling one of the linchpins of our nation's energy system. And if we cannot site new power lines like the one proposed by Allegheny Power and Dominion Virginia Power, it will not be possible for power companies to keep up with increasing demand for electricity and maintain the reliability of the electrical grid that we all depend upon.
The electricity transmission system is crucial to every facet of our lives. If the system is overloaded, it becomes unreliable. We have all become more dependent on digital microprocessor systems. They need reliable power. Every sector of our society and economy now has a need to make sure there are not bottlenecks in the electric transmission system. We need reliability in our electricity system.
The problem is that since the early 1990s far too little has been done to improve transmission reliability. As a result, much more electricity is moving over virtually the same transmission wires, pushing them to carry loads they were not built to handle.
Why is the United States one of the few advanced economies that suffers from perennial gridlock on projects to improve our nation's infrastructure? Are we supposed to believe that Americans are incapable of working out their differences? We need transmission lines.
We can and should through an open process find the best route taking into account all considerations.
But our leadership and we who support our leaders must move forward. We must support building now the infrastructure we need.
We must take decisive action to prevent a local failure and regional bottlenecks from snowballing into a catastrophic one. We must move forward to foster the cooperation necessary to break the impasse over so many worthwhile infrastructure improvements.
Lyons is a professor of engineering at West Virginia University.
