America's infrastructure: Beams disintegrating under bridges - East Idaho News
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America’s infrastructure: Beams disintegrating under bridges

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WASHINGTON (CNN) — Nearly 40 million Americans will kick off one of the busiest travel seasons in history this Memorial Day weekend, jarred by potholes on America’s roads, crossing her aging bridges, riding her antiquated railways and taking off from airports that draw international scorn.

Long a source of national pride, America’s infrastructure is in critical need of repair, but federal government spending on the issue has gone down 9% in the past decade. As former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood says, “We’re like a third-world country when it comes to infrastructure.”

CNN aviation and regulation correspondent Rene Marsh investigates the state of the country’s bridges, railways, airports and pipelines in a four-part series: America’s Crumbling Infrastructure. Check back here from now through Monday.

Part 1: Bridges supported by crumbling 90-year-old beams

Nearly 60,000 bridges across the country are in desperate need of repair. One example is just down the street from the White House and Capitol Hill. In the nation’s capital, 68,000 vehicles cross the Arlington Memorial Bridge between Washington and Virginia every day. CNN was granted rare access to go inside the crumbling bridge.

“It’s just eroding and concrete is falling off,” said National Park Service spokeswoman Jenny Anzelmo-Sarles as she showed how the original support beams from 1932 are corroding. The beams have never been replaced, and the bridge could be closed to vehicle traffic within five years if it isn’t fixed. It’ll cost $250 million.

In 1932, as the Arlington Memorial Bridge was being erected, Congress was dealing with the Great Depression. That same year, President Herbert Hoover enacted the first federal gas tax at 1 cent per gallon. The gas tax is a major source of funding for bridges and roads that has been raised periodically until 1993, when it was set at 18.4 cents per gallon.

Although the gas tax has remained steady, cars have become more efficient and overall federal government spending on infrastructure has declined 9% from 2003-14, according to the Congressional Budget Office. According to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, every state has some degree of bad bridges that need to be repaired. In Los Angeles, CNN found trees growing out of cracks in a bridge. In Chicago, netting is in place to protect drivers from falling concrete.

LaHood was a rare Republican who served in President Barack Obama’s administration. He says there’s an easy way to fund upgrades to an infrastructure system that has become “third-world”: Raise the gas tax. LaHood and others blame Congress for failing to raise the gas tax in 23 years.

Republican Rep. Bill Shuster, who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said raising the gas tax “doesn’t solve the long-term funding problem.” But Congress has not yet come up with a solution.

Beyond funding, there is another issue: how to make the bridges better. Researchers at the University of Michigan believe they may have a fix: bendable concrete that can heal itself from cracks. Demonstration in the university’s engineer lab shows regular concrete can fail quickly and suddenly. Professor Victor Li, who developed the technology over the past 10 years, said the bendable concrete can withstand a force hundreds of times more powerful than standard concrete. The researchers’ hope is that it could help already crumbling bridges, like the Memorial Bridge near the nation’s capital.

But new concrete is expensive. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, bridge infrastructure investment needs to be increased by $8 billion annually. The society said that increase would address the estimated $76 billion in needs for deficient bridges across the United States.

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