"Most Of Our Infrastructure Was Built For A Planet That No Longer Exists"

[hatrack]

EDIT

Walking through the battered, mud-covered main street of Sanford, Mich., flooded from a breached dam, and the dry moonscape that once was Wixom Lake, held back by the Edenville Dam, brought me a visceral sense of dread. The story that has been well covered in recent days is one of finger-pointing between the lake homeowners, the dam owner, and the city, county, state and federal authorities: to assign blame for the tragedy and the damage.

But a key underlying dynamic has gotten a lot less attention. According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, heavy precipitation events, fueled by more moisture in a warming atmosphere, have increased almost 40 percent across the upper Midwest in recent decades. Like sea level rise, ice-sheet loss, ocean acidification, desertification and deforestation, the change has been, in human terms, gradual, and for those not paying attention, easy to ignore.

Most of our infrastructure — the roads, dams, bridges, hospitals, airports, harbors, power plants, pipelines, businesses, storm sewers and homes — was built for a planet that no longer exists. Climate change is not something that will only take place in the future. The climate has already changed in large because of human actions, and the sooner we recognize this and adapt, the better.

For most of us, climate change won’t be like the giant tsunamis and superstorms from the movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” at least in the coming few decades. Instead, it will take the form of insidious, creeping, gradual changes that tend not to draw the media and public attention and that force politicians to deal with them. That is, until extreme events push our infrastructure past important thresholds. Storms come and go, but as long as the water stays a few inches below the levee, life goes on. Then, suddenly, with just an extra inch of rise, a barrier is overtopped, and life changes abruptly, and permanently.

EDIT

https://climatecrocks.com/2020/05/27/michigan-dam-failures-show-midwest-increasingly-vulnerable-to-climate-change/#more-60199

[Chainfire]

1. The problem is that we have been living for free

from the labor or our ancestors. We have not invested sufficiently into maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure, because it would cut it to the wealth of the top couple of percentage of the population.

When I was a kid, the rural county that I live in paved hundreds of miles of what were previously dirt roads. Fast forward 65 years and these same roads are now just a series of potholes linked together with bad patches. No money has been spend on replacing or properly repairing the roads or bridges. We could afford it in the 60s but not now, why is that?