The catastrophic events around the California Oroville Dam in recent
weeks underscores a far more urgent problem. The American Society of
Civil Engineers has just released their
quadrennial assessment of United States essential infrastructure–roads,
clean water supplies, levees, ports, dams, bridges, electric grid. The
report gives the nation a near-failing D+ grade. America is coming to
resemble the economic infrastructure in the Soviet Union domestically at
the collapse of communism during the late 1980’s. The
recently-announced Donald Trump proposal to invest $1 trillion over ten
years to address the problem, mainly building high-speed trains (to date
the USA has not one) doesn’t even come close to the scope of the
problem.
