Infrastructure
New York State road work account raided, little left for repairs
Michelle Breidenbach of The Post-Standard (Syracuse, N.Y.) mined state financial documents to show the abuse of New York State’s Dedicated Highway and Bridge Trust Fund. It’s not “dedicated” at all. Years of raiding and borrowing have left just 22 percent of the fund to fix the state roads.
Read MoreCost of Bay Area bridge project unprecedented
Patricia Decker and Robert Porterfield have found the construction project on the east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be the most expensive project ever done in the state of California. While overall costs have been presented to the public, Decker and Porterfield report that the interest on the money borrowed to pay…
Read MoreCanal safety issues were raised prior to fatal mudslide
An investigation by Matthew D. LaPlante and Nate Carlisle of The Salt Lake Tribune found that “Logan City received repeated warnings that a privately owned canal that runs along the base of a steep bluff posed a danger to those living below, but the city failed to act on that safety issue, or even to…
Read MoreCity cannot account for one quarter of its water supply
“Of the 2.1 billion gallons of water that flowed through city water mains in fiscal year 2007-2008, 26 percent went unbilled – or unaccounted – for,” according to an analysis of utility records by The News Herald (Panama City, Fla.). Based on the retail rate of water in Panama City, the lost revenue from the…
Read MoreCities and county failed to inspect fire hydrants
An investigation by Matt Dixon of The Villages Daily Sun (The Villages, Fla.) revealed that fire hydrants in Sumter County have not been regularly inspected. A request for maintenance records by the paper revealed that none existed. Municipalities county-wide had been under the impression that the county was responsible for the maintenance of fire hydrants. …
Read MoreStreetlight outages plague Detroit
The Detroit Free Press looked into the on-going problem of streetlight outages in the city. “The Free Press spent three nights in March driving more than 200 miles of city streets examining the state of some of Detroit’s 88,000 lights, at least 9,000 of which are out.” Response to reports of outages are met with…
Read MoreCoal ash dam in Tennessee had previous leaks
“The chief executive of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates the coal-burning power plant responsible for an enormous flood of coal ash in East Tennessee late last month, acknowledged Thursday that the plant’s containment ponds had leaked two other times in the last five years but had not been adequately repaired,” according to a report…
Read MoreRoad repairs slower in minority neighborhoods
Keegan Kyle, Grant Smith and Ben Poston of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analyzed more than 11,000 pothole fixes in the city of Milwaukee and found that the city repaired potholes at a slower rate in minority neighborhoods in the first half of the year. Using SPSS, the analysis found that minority areas on the north…
Read MorePopulation growth impacting dam safety issues
A report by Jim Getz of The Dallas Morning News looks at the impact of population growth on dam safety. The investigation “found that suburban sprawl has encroached on hundreds of dams in Texas that were once in remote locations – including dozens in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.” Development upstream from a dam increases runoff…
Read MoreProgress slow in bridge repairs across the U.S.
“A year after the worst U.S. bridge collapse in a generation brought calls for immediate repairs to other spans, two of every three of the busiest problem bridges in each state — carrying nearly 40 million vehicles a day — have had no work beyond regular maintenance,” report Robert Tanner, Steve Karnowski and Frank Bass…
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