Not a laughing matter
Bridge ceremony holds little meaning with infrastructure crumbling
08/23/2007
It takes more than a slice of giant novelty scissors through a huge swatch of red tape to prove that state and local officials are improving life in Ventura County and California.
But dozens of regional figures met Aug. 16 at a ceremony near the east bank of the Santa Clara River to mark the official opening of the new Highway 101 bridge over the waterway.
Although the ceremony touted the cooperative effort between local, county, and state officials on the $100 million project, and speakers openly acknowledged delays in its construction — including the May 24, 2006 murder of construction worker Steven Knapp — the bridge remains a symbol of government inefficiency and torpor.
In past issues we have commented on the ultimate ineffectualness the bridge and other planned highway expansions will have on the county’s traffic problems (see “On a road to nowhere,” Opinion, 7/26/07). Now that politicians from both parties and many levels of state government have cheered the project, there is an opportunity to remind them that the bridge opening stands in marked contrast to the actual state of our county, our state’s, and our nation’s infrastructure.
Our roadways, our water supplies, and our power grids are crumbling. That’s not news.
Sadly, though, two weeks before the ceremony, the nation was reminded that neglect of our infrastructure can have tragic consequences, when a portion of Interstate 35-W in Minnesota collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 and injuring more than 100 people.
In California, it has since been revealed, 1,620 state-owned bridges and 1,950 local bridges have been deemed “structurally deficient” under a federal rating system. U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) rightly assailed California Department of Transportation Director Will Kempton for saying that the terms used to describe the bridges should be watered down.
Kempton, who spoke at the ceremony for the Highway 101 bridge project, might be right to be cautious about alarming the public, but he and other transportation officials should be spending their time and effort scrutinizing the safety of those questionable bridges in the state before a problem occurs, not after a tragedy hits our fellow Californians. He also shouldn’t be making light of the Minneapolis tragedy, as he did at the ceremony when he said jokingly “and I can assure you, this bridge is safe” (and those who laughed should be ashamed of themselves).
Of course, the elephant in the room is the current war in Iraq (although many can see this elephant), which as of Aug. 21 has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $454.03 billion. Anyone prepared to rant about rampant federalism and excessive taxation should consider the costs — both human and financial — we OK’ed without a full understanding of their extent or necessity and the tradeoffs we have made to pay for them. Libertarians, meanwhile, need to realize that the significance of a capable, competent government is its ability to insure the strength, stability and safety of our infrastructure (not that our current government has that competence).
The disaster in the Twin Cities was not our first lesson. As Hurricane Dean hits Mexico, we are reminded of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and the obscenely poor preparation and response on the part of the federal government to the storms.
Infrastructure problems don’t have to be tragic. Up the coast, Santa Barbara residents experienced a power outage Aug. 20 that knocked out electrical service to 2,600 homes. That outage reminds us that our electrical infrastructure is incredibly outdated. While Ventura County can claim a system not quite as antiquated as Santa Barbara’s World War II era paper insulated lead piping cables, some communities, such as parts of Thousand Oaks and Camarillo, still have aging power grids.
Moroever, as Saundra Sorenson reports in this week’s edition of the Reporter (see “Are you prepared?” on page 8) any disaster that could befall our infrastructure could be compounded by the fact that California emergency officials continue to be hampered by limitations in federal funding and communication for disaster preparedness efforts.
With all this information about a state on the brink of disaster, why stand idly by?
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