There are a lot of people in the United States right now who think the country is falling apart, and at least in one respect they're correct. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, our airports are out of date and the vast majority of our seaports are in danger of becoming obsolete. All the result of decades of neglect. None of this is really in dispute. Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a one time cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed. There is still no consensus on how to solve the problem or where to get the massive amounts of money needed to fix it, just another example of political paralysis in Washington.
Tens of millions of American cross over bridges every day without giving it much thought, unless they hit a pothole. But the infrastructure problem goes much deeper than pavement. It goes to crumbling concrete and corroded steel and the fact that nearly 70,000 bridges in America -- one out of every nine -- is now considered to be structurally deficient.
Ray LaHood: Our infrastructure is on life support right now. That's what we're on.
Few people are more aware of the situation than Ray LaHood, who was secretary of transportation during the first Obama administration, and before that a seven-term Republican congressman from Illinois. He is currently co-chairman of Building America's Future, a bipartisan coalition of current and former elected officials that is urgently pushing for more spending on infrastructure.
Steve Kroft: According to the government, there are 70,000 bridges that have been deemed structurally deficient.
Ray LaHood: Yep.
Steve Kroft: What does that mean?
Ray LaHood: It means that there are bridges that need to be really either replaced or repaired in a very dramatic way.
Steve Kroft: They're dangerous?
Ray LaHood: I don't want to say they're unsafe. But they're dangerous. I would agree with that.
Steve Kroft: If you were going to take me someplace, any place in the country, to illustrate the problem, where would you take me?
Ray LaHood: There is a lot of places we could go. You could go to any major city in America and see roads, and bridges, and infrastructure that need to be fixed today. They need to be fixed today.
We decided to start in Pittsburgh, which may have the most serious problem in the country. Our guide was Andy Herrmann, a past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Steve Kroft: From up here you can see why they call it the city of bridges.
Andy Herrmann: Yeah. Between the highway and the railroad bridges. There's many of them.
Steve Kroft: And most of them old.
Andy Herrmann: Most of them old. They're nearing the end of their useful lives, yeah.
There are more than more than 4,000 bridges in metropolitan Pittsburgh and 20 percent of them are structurally deficient, including one of the city's main arteries.
Steve Kroft: This is the Liberty Bridge ahead? An important bridge for Pittsburgh.
Andy Herrmann: A very important bridge for Pittsburgh. A connection from the south to the city itself, and then to the north.
It was built in 1928 when cars and trucks were much lighter. It was designed to last 50 years -- that was 86 years ago. Every day in Pittsburgh five million people travel across bridges that either need to be replaced or undergo major repairs.
Andy Herrmann: One of these arch bridges actually has a structure built under it to catch falling deck. See that structure underneath it? They actually built that to catch any of the falling concrete so it wouldn't hit traffic underneath it.
Steve Kroft: That's amazing.
Andy Herrmann: It all comes down to funding. Right now they can't keep up with it. Three hundred bridges become structurally deficient each year in the state of Pennsylvania. That's one percent added to the already 23 percent they already have. They just can't fix them fast enough.
Pennsylvania is one of the worst states in country when it comes to the condition of its infrastructure, and Philadelphia isn't any better off than Pittsburgh. Nine million people a day travel over 900 bridges classified as structurally deficient, some of them on a heavily traveled section of I-95. Ed Rendell is a former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania.
Steve Kroft: How critical is this stretch of I-95 to the country?
Ed Rendell: It's a nation's number one highway. Twenty-two miles of it goes through the city of Philadelphia. There are 15 structurally deficient bridges in that 22-mile stretch. And to fix them would cost seven billion dollars -- to fix all the roads and the structurally deficient bridges in that 22-mile stretch.
Rendell says no one knows where the money is going to come from and this stretch of I-95 has already had one brush with disaster. In 2008 two contractors from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation stopped to get a sausage sandwich, and parked their cars under this bridge.
Ed Rendell: And fortunately they wanted that sausage sandwich because they saw one of these piers with an eight foot gash in it about five inches wide. And oh, they knew automatically that this bridge was in deep trouble.
Continued:
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