KCBS Radio In Depth

Crumbling America: The Infrastructure Crossroads

Infrastructure is essential to our everyday lives. When infrastructure works, it often goes unnoticed or is taken for granted. When it fails, all hell can break loose. Three years ago, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed into law. It was hailed as a once-in-a-generation investment, but has the bipartisan law delivered on its promise? Mike DeNardo from KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia has more in this In Depth report.

Duration:: 30m
Broadcast on:: 03 Jan 2025
Audio Format:: other

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You hear that? Those are the sounds of infrastructure at work. The power that charges your devices. The road you drive. The water you wash in. Infrastructure can be a vast topic. Something that's so massive that it's hard to fully wrap your mind around. But it's essential to our everyday lives. When infrastructure works, it often goes unnoticed or is taken for granted. When it fails, all hell can break loose. We're literally living in one of the richest areas in the world. I just don't understand how the infrastructure can be so bad. Three years ago, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed into law. Thank you, thank you. It was hailed as a once-in-a-generation investment. The bill about the sign along is proof. That's despite the cynics, Democrats and Republicans can come together and deliver results. But has the bipartisan infrastructure law delivered on this promise? What has it done for you? How much further do we need to go? A lot of how our infrastructure is stated. You got to have reliability and consumers have to be able to pay their bills. We really need to start the conversation about what the next thought of your surface bill ought to look like. I'm Mike DiNardo from KWW News Radio in Philadelphia. And for the last four decades, I've been covering how one of the biggest cities in the country works. Join me for crumbling America, the infrastructure crossroads, and Odyssey conversation. We purchased this property 30 years ago, and the bridge was in horrible condition. And we've been waiting 25 years for them to rebuild the bridge. Earlier this fall, a North Philadelphia man got his wish. A bridge in his neighborhood was finally repaired and reopened. One of the first projects in Philadelphia to receive funding from the bipartisan infrastructure law. We'll start our program with one of the faces of infrastructure in the United States. Pete Buttigieg is the United States Secretary of Transportation. His department is among those responsible for dispersing the $1.2 trillion of funding in the infrastructure law. And he joins us now. Mr. Secretary, you've traveled to all 50 states. You've had a chance to assess our infrastructure. Do you see the infrastructure law having an effect yet? Is the pace fast enough? And can we keep up? Yeah, this is exactly what we're setting out to address. You know, this is a problem that is decades in the making. But with this bipartisan infrastructure law, the backlog of improvements is finally getting smaller rather than larger. And the condition of our infrastructure is finally getting better rather than worse. It's not all going to change overnight, but we are now backing about 60,000 projects around the country, about 175,000 miles of roadway. Being improved, that's enough to cross the U.S. and back dozens of times. About 10,000 projects just with bridges alone. Now, some of these are already underway. We've had a summer construction launching many of these, but many of them are yet to come. We've lined up the funding. And now they're finalizing the plans are doing the last pieces of engineering work. So really, what we're talking about is not just a one-off, not just a big year or two of construction, but really kind of an infrastructure decade that I think is going to change our relationship to our transportation infrastructure in the years ahead. From Philadelphia to New York to Chicago, farther west of California, you could probably cite a handful of infrastructure-related projects that, despite their intent or purpose or function, they ultimately had detrimental effects on neighborhoods and communities. How much are some of the federal investments in infrastructure geared at writing some of those wrongs, if you will, to address the cultural effects of developments of the past? That's true. A decision that was made 30 years ago or 50 years ago or 100 years ago could still be affecting the everyday life of people in a neighborhood or a community, especially if that neighborhood or community was not included in the original decision. And we saw that happen in so many parts of the country. The whole point of infrastructure is to connect. And yet we've seen many places where this transportation infrastructure has actually served to divide, sometimes cutting a neighborhood or community into. There's examples of that everywhere from Detroit to Buffalo, New York to Birmingham, Alabama. And there's an example of that in Philadelphia with this fine street expressway in the way it cuts through Chinatown. So instead of wringing our hands over it, we think we ought to do something about it, especially because everybody's better off when we reconnect the fabric of a part of a city that was torn up in the past. Now in this case, that means funding the what's called the Chinatown Stitch Project, as you said, the idea is to put a cap over the expressway, basically a roof over that highway that cuts like a gas right now through the community. Sure, we should point out that federal money is also going to the project to put a cap over I-95, which separated the city from its waterfront along the Delaware River. Same concept there, I imagine. Yes, that's right. That one's longer in the making, but we'll have the same overall idea. And you know, it's different from place to place. Some places, it's a full-on covering of a highway. Other places, it may be more about making sure there's better transit connections or a pedestrian bridge. It really, we're not one-size-fits-all. As you know, problems abound with the country's aviation system. How will the infrastructure law address aviation capacity? Well, that's definitely an issue. It's been a head-spinning change. When I first got here into this job three and a half years ago, the big question about our aviation sector was, are the airlines all going to go out of business. Now we see the opposite problem. Really swift growth in aviation passenger demand. Of course, that's a good sign economically, but we need to make sure our capacity can keep up. We've pressed the airlines to do their part and they've managed to improve on their record compared to a couple of years ago when I called on them to change the reality and the state of play. So last year, we were able to get to the lowest level of cancellations in about a decade, but I am concerned going forward about our infrastructure keeping up. That's one of the reasons why we're putting so much into airports, terminals, in some cases, runways, taxiways, but we also, alongside preparing for that increased aviation demand, we also have to create good alternatives. There are a lot of places that are a little too long to conveniently drive, but maybe a little too short for it to really make sense to fly. If we have the kind of passenger rail options that most countries do, that third option would take some of the pressure off of congestion on our roads and competition for our limited runways. That's part of why we're investing in passenger rail. So we really have that three-legged stool, three different ways to get from point A to point B. You talk about rail. How is the Federal Transit Administration ensuring the safety of our aging mass transit systems? Part of the bipartisan infrastructure package is the most federal funding that has ever gone to transit. And this is exactly why we need to make more investments in transit, because so many people count on it. And even the people who don't use it benefit from the people who do, because it means reduced congestion and pollution along our roadways. My final question for you, could the federal government be doing more to help state, local, and regional authorities when it comes to getting people around? Is there another bipartisan infrastructure law in our future? Well, I have to point out that we are in year three out of five, and this fiscal year is almost done. So pretty soon we'll be in year four out of five of the five-year life of this Biden-Harris infrastructure package known as the bipartisan infrastructure law. So I do think it's the right time. We really need to start the conversation about what the next five-year surface bill ought to look like. I think we've learned a lot. A lot of things are going right with the infrastructure bill we're in now, but there's clearly going to be more need. We've got to be smart about using our dollar as well and putting up the kinds of investments that are really going to benefit us. And I expect the next year we'll bring a very robust conversation about what that looks like in practice for the future. We'll watch that play out. Mr. Secretary, thank you for joining us. Thank you. It's a privilege to be with you. We spent the evening in the airport with very little information, very little empathy or sympathy, and very little in monetary reimbursement as well. So we're not happy. When it's good, it's super good, but when it's bad, it's super bad. Small children should have to sit in the back of the plane with their parents, and they should get all the last. Higher than TSA. Make that process a little quicker. This is Crumbling America, the infrastructure crossroads and Odyssey conversation. I'm Mike DiNardo from KYWA News Radio in Philadelphia. Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers grades the country's infrastructure. Their most recent report card in 2021, not great. The United States got a C minus overall, and D's in 11 subcategories, including aviation, which got a D plus. Bob Wright and Kevin Brown helped put together the ASCE report card, and with the next one due out in 2025, they join us now. Bob, let's start with aviation. Why a D plus? I think that's a couple of factors going on there. Mike, one is the capacity of the airport, so the capability of adding runways just is not there. So you have to make the runways work that much more efficiently. Not easy to do with safety rules and things of that nature. The funding is there. Trying to make those improvements may not be as easy to do. It might be very disruptive. We've had two major airports built in the United States in the last 50 years, one at Dallas-Fort Worth, which is almost 50 years old, a new one at Denver, which is about 20 years old. Again, we're not seeing those new airports because the space isn't there in major metropolitan areas. The best that we can do with that is try to make the best of the space that we have and make capacity work a little better. There are some improvements that can be made in air traffic control. Kevin, I want to ask you about the nation's roads. A big picture. The roads got a D on the report card. What are some of the factors that play into that grade? Similar to airports, you look at the current capacity and what the future needs are and how are we able to meet those needs. We also look at the future threats. How can these roads withstand future threats or future heavy weather conditions and things like that? We look at those things and that's how we develop the grade. We also look at available funding and what the funding is allocated towards our roadways. So factors like that go into what brings about a grade of a D. Transit, which is closely related to roads, got a D minus, why a D minus for transit. I think what you're looking at again is a lack of investment during the previous federal administration. There was no transportation funding legislation passed. So when we got to IHA in the past couple years, that made up for about six years of non-investment. The other thing to look at again, especially with rail cars, there's probably a five to seven year lead time for that replacement. Now, since the 2021 report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the bipartisan infrastructure law was passed. That's $1.2 trillion allocated for many of the projects that the report card has said need attention. So what has the impact been? Should we expect that when the society issues its report card in 2025 next year, that there will be improved grades? Kevin, what do you think? Well, locally on the construction side, I see that we're slowly seeing more weddings, which means there's more projects hitting the streets, seeing more innovation. There's a continued effort to push, at least locally, digital delivery by 2025, 3D modeling, things like that, something that is a little bit more modern, I would say. So looking at the efficiency of that can ultimately save us money that can be used to expand the program of what we're doing out here with building new projects and maintaining what we have. How long are we going to be in this sea grade area? How long will it take the nation to dig out of this average grade, Bob? I think it's going to take a while, Mike. I think we need to be patient. One thing we're finding is we're making up for lost time with the lack of federal funding that we had for a number of years. But while we were waiting, some facilities continued to age. So we've got more projects that we've got to address. The other problem that we see, especially for the major facilities, is that the traffic levels are so high that the only time we can do those is at night or on weekends. What we're seeing is a lot of people in the construction industry are getting into the end of their careers. They're retiring. We don't see the younger people coming in and becoming apprentices. So we're losing a lot of institutional knowledge that knows how to make these things happen. We're not on the other end bringing in new people to train them. And again, even if we did bring them in, they're looking at having to work nights and weekends. So it's not very enticing for somebody that wants to start out. Well, what do you think individuals can do to keep our roads, our bridges, our water systems? What can they do to advocate for that? It's the old, if you see something, say something, thing, and it's incumbent upon us to be the advocate. The let our elected officials know that this is what we need. Bob Wright, Kevin Brown from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Thank you so much. Local news can come at you fast. Want the latest on what's happening in your backyard? Download the free Odyssey app. Follow your local news station and you'll get alerts on the top stories making headlines in your city. You can stay in the know no matter what you're up to and be among the first to find out when news breaks. Plus, keep tabs on weather and traffic so you're never caught off guard. To get started, download the Odyssey app. That's A-U-D-A-C-Y and follow your local news station. This is crumbling America. We've been sitting here about an hour now for firewood. We don't have any electricity. We've been out of electricity for 24, more than 48 hours, I guess. Now we have a fireplace, so it's keeping us warm in there. I'm Mike DiNardo from KYW News Radio in Philadelphia, and this is crumbling America, the infrastructure crossroads, and Odyssey conversation. Never before in the history of the world has demand for electricity been so high. Making this all the more complicated, the grid that connects the power generators to our homes is aging. Here to talk about the challenges facing the power grid is Asim Hock, senior VP of governmental and member services at PJM Interconnection. PJM coordinates the transmission of electricity in 13 mostly Mid-Atlantic states and the District of Columbia. Asim, welcome. Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having us. Can you describe for simply how the grid works? How does electricity get from the power plants to our outlets at home? So there are really three primary components of electricity generation and then delivery. So you've got to generate the watt, then you've got to transmit the watt. And when you transmit the watt, you transmit it to the folks who send you your power bills. So the easiest way to think about this is generation, transmission, distribution. PJM, which is one of nine grid operators in North America, we make sure that for instance, here in Philly, Pico gets its power. How old are the transmission lines that transmit the power? Look, some transmission lines are more than many decades old. Some transmission lines are brand new. What's really fascinating about the build out of transmission is one thing that we're seeing in our footprint is the challenge of, we'll just call it nimbism or not in my backyard, making it a lot more challenging to build new transmission than it used to be. We are really in need of energy infrastructure and that includes transmission. What is the status of the existing grid? Could it handle all of the future demand that you anticipate that the region and the nation are going to need? You hit a really hot button issue for us right now and so they're really for just the listener. There are a few things going on in the power grid in the system today. The first is we're in an energy transition. We're in an energy transition to a cleaner grid and cleaner resources. We've got two little boys at home. That's a good thing. It's a good thing to want to breathe cleaner air, but it does present its challenges. That sort of thing one presents his challenges operationally for us. That sort of thing one. Thing two is you hit it and increase in demand and insatiable need for electricity and energy and power. That's driven by, as our economy continues to electrify, including electric vehicles, we are going to continue to see that trend. A big, big cause of that trend also is data center growth. The final piece, supply is dwindling and that is also a net result of the clean energy transition as well as some economics, but supply is dwindling on a year by year basis. How does that play out? When do you reach a critical mass where the existing grid can't handle that? We are slowly approaching it. The net impact will really be to challenge the two sort of pillars that our power grid and our power system has been built upon. That's the reliability of the system. The second impact is cost. I think you are going to see an uptick in cost as we advance and the supply demand sort of conditions continue to tighten. All right. Let's look at a worst-case scenario. How many years before someone turns on the light switch, it doesn't work? We produced a report in February of 2023. It's available on our website. We affectionately refer to it as the for our report, resource retirements, replacement, and risk. And what we project out is that towards the end of this decade, we will lose "resource adequacy" and that is having enough supply to meet demand and a required reserve margin. That's not very long. It is not. So what do we do about this? What is the government doing to try to increase capacity of the grid? Yeah, look, and we operate a 14 state power grid and we have a variety of, we'll just characterize it as energy policies in those 14 states. When we're talking about policymaking, avoid policies that push resources off the system before there are replacements in place that are shown to be operational. That's the first thing. And the second thing is, I mentioned this earlier, this nimbism concept. It is really becoming a threat to the ability to advance infrastructure. And look, I get it. I get it. I'm a former regulator myself. I used to oversee a sighting board, but that is also becoming a challenge as well. Anything that can be done to expedite the construction of infrastructure would be great. And we've got to look at the grid not from a partisan perspective, but a, hey, there are two fundamentals that everybody needs before you can get to all of these policy objectives. You got to have reliability and consumers have to be able to pay their bills. Hasim Hawke is the senior vice president of governmental and member services at PJM Interconnection. Employee systems were completely inoperable. When they came in and saw their computers, what they saw was that dog ting blue screen. New wars are being waged and threats emerging online. And yes, as the crowd strike crash demonstrated this summer, there's always the risk of system malfunctions too. Dr. Pablo Molina is the chief information security officer at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He's going to tell us where our digital infrastructure is vulnerable and what we can do about it. Dr. Molina, welcome. It's a pleasure to be here. So we have been evaluating the state of various facts of our nation's infrastructure. A big picture, how would you grade the health of our nation's digital infrastructure? Well, I teach cybersecurity, so I'm going to issue a grade here, and I would give the health of our digital infrastructure a B minus. And the reason why I would give it a B minus is because we have made good progress investing in new technologies, fixing and upgrading some of the old ones, and also securing others. However, there's still many obsolete and old systems to manage our waters, which power hospitals and other critical infrastructure. So those are things that our government controlled. Is this a responsibility of the government ultimately to improve and update its digital architecture? So this is interesting, but particularly in the United States, it's the private sector who bears the brunt of this responsibility to make sure that they are well prepared to deal with unforeseen circumstances. So where are the weak points? Is it old, outdated software? Is it inadequate protection against hackers or a little of each? A little of both, exactly. So on the one hand, a lot of our infrastructure is dated compared to new infrastructure for the countries who started developing some of these systems much later than we did. And we have failed to keep up with some of these upgrades. The other part has to do with the fact that there are lots of bad people out there, bad guys who are trying to get to our information and our systems. And they will use any weapon at their disposal, including social engineering, tricking our human operators or using the vulnerabilities of our old systems in order to bring down this infrastructure. So we learned that these companies and organizations on which we depend, airlines, hospitals, emergency services, and their suppliers, in this case CrowdStrike and Microsoft, were not resilient. They were unprepared to prevent and recover quickly from technology disruptions. Is it wise for so many computers to be dependent on one operating system? So there is a very interesting idea and of course there is some truth to that. All systems are vulnerable to some extent. And now critical systems must be engineered in such a way that they minimize the risk of disruption, which has not happened with Microsoft and has not happened with CrowdStrike as we saw recently. Now, this may mean using different providers in banks or airlines or hospitals. For example, the same way they use sometimes different data centers in different parts of the world. And also may also mean diversifying the technologies and the partners that they use to serve the public. Expensive but probably practical. Correct. And when we look at the cost and the losses of a big disruption, sometimes factoring that in, it turns out that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of problems. Insights on digital infrastructure from Dr. Pablo Molina, Chief Information Security Officer at Drexel University in Philadelphia. The water lines break here all the time. The pipes are old. They've been underground for decades. They're having to scramble now to fix old pipes in a landslide when some of this was preventable or foreseeable. Water is essential and life-sustaining. And for most of us, it's the turn of a tap away. And when it's not, it's usually because somewhere between the primary local water source and your house, the infrastructure failed and a water main ruptured. Here to talk about why those things happened is Howard Newkrug, formerly the head of Philadelphia's water department, now a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and the executive director of the water center at Penn, Howard, welcome. Thank you very much. We've been talking about the American Society of Civil Engineers. They put out a report card that says there's a water main break every two minutes somewhere in the nation. The society gives our drinking water infrastructure a C minus structurally. Why do water mains break? What are the factors that go into water main breaking? There's a number of different reasons why pipes break and one is aged and another one is weather and another one is just the load that's coming down on that pipe. The EPA just released rules requiring water systems to replace pipes within a decade. In your view, is this doable? Is 10 years enough time for the governments in the area to replace their water lines? Well, just to back up a little bit, I'm not really sure that that is the best use of that money because there are so many other issues that are going on. The biggest thing that a water utility needs is more funding. For the federal government to prioritize what it should be doing as a utility, that's hard. It takes the money and puts it in a certain place. 10 years, it's doable, but what happens in 10 years is that you're a contractor. You only have so many contractors. If you start running out of contractors, the contractors need to raise their rates and you can do less lead service line replacements with that. And of course, it's very difficult to find them. They're all attached to the homeowners building. It's a real problem to remove them all. What grade would you give our current drinking water delivery system? I think we're still at a D and part of that reason is because of climate change and all the impacts are going to come and are we prepared for that. What are the threats that could be posed by climate change to our water systems? The issues that are out there are really involved with, first of all, the change in rain. It's more intense, more frequent, longer duration. That causes quite a bit of harm to the sewer systems. We also have drought and we have floods which have the obvious effects and then sea level rise. And as the tide goes up, we're going to have to be thinking about what we do with our coastline. And the solutions to all this seem to be laying in the area of go with two different types of treatment out there. One is desalinization and the other one is reuse. It's called toilet to tap. You're taking the waste from the wastewater treatment plant, which is then cleaned. And then you're putting it right into another treatment process that cleans it to a point where it is drinkable. Howard Newkrug from the Water Center at Penn, thanks for being with us. Thank you. You've been listening to Crumbling America, the infrastructure crossroads and Odyssey conversation. You can listen anytime on the free Odyssey app or go back on the app to catch something you missed using the Rewind feature. I'm Mike DiNardo. Thank you to our producer Brian Seltzer, our Odyssey colleagues at news radio stations across the country. And most importantly, thank you for joining us for Crumbling America, the infrastructure crossroads and Odyssey conversation.