Back during my na?ve undergrad days, I was convinced being a civil engineer was my one-way ticket to social super-stardom. After graduating, I would be embarking on a career of bringing people the sanitary sewers, wastewater treatment plants and other infrastructure that folks find so darn sexy. Needless to say, it was a bit of a harsh reality check when cool kids at parties would say, “What does a civil engineer do?” It was tempting to reply, “So what does a history major do?” but usually my response was to head to the corner to shed a tear in my beer.
Fortunately, the days of crying in the corner are over for enginerds, as President-elect Obama is proposing to bring the sexy back to our national infrastructure. Saturday he laid out the basics of his economic recovery plan that the nation so desperately needs. The backbone of his proposed plan will include the biggest national investment in infrastructure since engineers were rocking slide rules. Not only will his plan begin to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, but it will also provide jobs at a time when they are vanishing like students’ social lives during finals week.
Infrastructure is a critical part of the American economic machine that many folks overlook. The roads, sewers, buildings and engineering professors that Americans often take for granted provide the physical foundation that the American economic juggernaut is built on. If the nation’s infrastructure is allowed to deteriorate like an exponential-decay function, the result will be even more devastating to the economy than the current economic fiasco.
The possibility of U.S. economic power hitting a giant pothole is very real if the nation’s neglected infrastructure is not dealt with soon. The 2005 Infrastructure Report Card prepared by the American Society of Engineers (ASCE) gave the nation an overall grade of a D. This may be an impressive grade at the University of Michigan, but everywhere else it stands for “embarrassing.” Wisconsin only faired slightly better in 2007, earning an overall C from the Wisconsin ASCE chapter.
Sadly, it often takes disasters to provide the political will for action. There have been several recent infrastructure-related catastrophes in the U.S., including the breaching of the levies by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007. Given the vast amount of deteriorated structures across the country, similar fiascos will likely emerge unless rebuilding the foundation of the nation becomes a priority.
Rebuilding old infrastructure has never been as much of a turn-on for politicians as glamorous new projects are. However, now that the economic meltdown has gotten the attention of the nation like dead people in New Orleans and Minneapolis were not able to, there is a policy window for a major job-creating public works program that also makes infrastructure geeks gleefully giddy.
Wisconsin figures to play a central role in the infrastructure recovery program, as the super-important House Appropriations Committee is chaired by native Badger David Obey of Wausau. His central role in distributing the public works funds should help direct Wisconsin’s share of the recovery allocations toward areas such as roads and dams, where it is desperately needed. And since he is a UW-Madison alum, maybe he will find a few extra dollars to renovate the SERF and Nat.
President-elect Obama has not laid out the specifics of the recovery program yet, but during his address on Saturday he set a goal of creating 2.5 million jobs via programs focused on rebuilding infrastructure, schools and engineers’ social skills. His plan will probably resemble the Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank he proposed during his campaign, which called for spending $60 billion over the next 10 years to provide engineering graduates with employ — err, to rebuild the foundation of the nation so America can complete in the 21st-century world economy.
Paying for this new infrastructure will not be cheap, but after Americans have paid a lot of money to bail out banks and the Big Three, a little deficit spending that goes toward solidifying America’s physical backbone while providing jobs and producing economic value is a comparatively solid investment. And those public works-haters who oppose Obama’s infrastructure investments can wallow in the unemployment line while lamenting his pinko plan for socialized sewers and collectivized canals.
Obama’s economic recovery plan is the dawning of a new day for civil engineers and other dorks who dream about infrastructure at night. With the sexy being brought back to bridges, engineers will once again retain their rightful place atop the social hierarchy. Incorporating the rebuilding of America’s vital infrastructure foundation into Obama’s forthcoming economic recovery plan will not only create jobs and invest in American business, but it will also begin to fix an aging system that needs to be repaired if the nation is going to compete in the 21st-century world economy.
Zachary Schuster is a graduate student studying water resources engineering.
