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According to the ASCE, the nation needs to make a $2.2 trillion infrastructure investment over the next five years to address current deficiencies, some of which carry potential consequences that make the outcome of a 66-inch water main break pale in comparison. Thousands of the nation’s dams, for instance, are rated structurally deficient, and no fewer than 1,800 of those are rated “high hazard” dams, meaning their catastrophic failure would result in significant loss of life. Nearly a third of America’s high hazard dams have not been inspected in the past five years, and only half have in place EmergencyAction Plans for notifying and evacuating people residing below the dam in the event of a problem. The ASCE report lists similar deficiencies and dangers in almost every one of its 15 infrastructure categories.
The problem of inadequate maintenance is further compounded by the uniquely cyclical nature of new infrastructure investments, many of which have occurred at roughly the same time in the past, resulting in a lot of different components wearing out at about the same time in the present.
“Now all this New Deal stuff—the post offices and roads, the bridges and dams and schools and so on—is all coming to the end of its life on the same day. There is a tremendous need to reinvest.” Erica Schoenberger, professor of geography and environmental engineering
Yet it may be a mistake to look only on the dark side of this challenge, suggests Erica Schoenberger, professor of geography and environmental engineering at the Whiting School. Schoenberger’s specialty is economic geography, which is the study of the location, distribution, and spatial organization of economic activities across nations and their change over time. She sees in the crisis of collapsing levees and falling bridges the seeds of something new. “During the New Deal and after World War II we built a ton of infrastructure,” she says of the nation’s civic building spree in the mid-20th century. “Now all this New Deal stuff—the post offices and roads, the bridges and dams and schools and so on—is all coming to the end of its life on the same day. There is a tremendous need to reinvest.
“It’s a huge burden. But it’s also a tremendous opportunity if we choose to look upon it that way.” What is most needed now, she says, is engineering that anticipates the needs of the 21st century. “If you are going to overhaul stuff that is about to fall apart, that is the perfect time to invest in future technologies,” she says.
Recognizing that a once-in-generations alignment of need, interest, and opportunity was at hand, a group of Johns Hopkins faculty led by civil engineering associate professor and department chair Ben Schafer, and principal investigator Ben Hobbs, of Geography and Environmental Engineering, has proposed a new center to study and remedy infrastructure systems under stress. The innovative and highly collaborative venture would fundamentally reframe how infrastructure is assessed, modeled, and inspected in the future.
“Around the time of the stimulus funding [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009], I asked a group of faculty from across the school to sit down and talk about what Hopkins could do to help,” says Schafer, WSE’s Swirnow Family Faculty Scholar. He did not expect the enthusiasm of the responses his request elicited.