Hardwood Floors April May 2018

GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS INDUSTRY INSIGHTS

By Dana Cole

Photo courtesy of Matthew Hamilton

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U.S. NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE RECEIVES A BARELY PASSING GRADE

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• Dams: e average age of the 90,580 dams in the U.S. is 56 years. e overall number of high-hazard potential dams is increasing, with the number climbing to nearly 15,500 in 2016. Due to the lack of investment, the number of de cient high- hazard potential dams has also climbed to an estimated 2,170 or more. • Drinking Water: Drinking water is delivered via one million miles of pipes across the country. Many of those pipes were laid in the early to mid-20th century with a life span of 75 to 100 years. e quality of drinking water in the U.S. remains high, but legacy and emerging contaminants continue to require close a ention. While water consumption is down, there are still an estimated 240,000 water main breaks per year in the U.S., wasting more than two trillion gallons of treated drinking water.

President Trump gave his rst State of the Union address January 29, laying out his agenda for 2018. (Note: O cially, his 2017 appearance in the U.S. House of Representatives was an “address to a joint session of Congress.” Coming so soon a er the inauguration, it is not referred to as a State of the Union speech.) A signi cant piece of that agenda was addressing the state of the national infrastructure, an issue in great need of a ention, but one that has bedeviled past administrations. Infrastructure as a category is a diverse one. It encompasses a wide range of ma ers including roads, bridges, waterways, railways, energy sources, aviation, and dams. ere is broad agreement that the U.S. system is in need of a ention and improvement. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the U.S. a grade of D+ for its overall infrastructure quality. e study cited eye-opening statistics, including the following: • Roads: More than two out of every ve miles of America’s urban interstates are congested, and tra c delays cost the country $160 billion in wasted time and fuel in 2014. One out of every ve miles of highway pavement is in poor condition, and our roads have a signi cant and increasing backlog of rehabilitation needs. • Bridges: e U.S. has 614,387 bridges, almost four in 10 of which are 50 years or older. 56,007 – 9.1 percent – of the nation’s bridges were structurally de cient in 2016, and on average, there were 188 million trips across a structurally de cient bridge each day.

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