Infrastructure Whack-a-Mole

It is said that April showers bring May flowers but so far we have mostly had April torrential downpours. It has been awfully rainy even by spring standard for the northern Midwest.

When you get a lot of rainfall it quickly saturates the ground and then subsequent rainfall has to go somewhere so it ends up in rivers which in turn flood. That isn’t that big of a deal normally, around here you know where the flood plains are so mostly people don’t build on them. Lots of farm fields go under water some springs but not always. That is life in northeastern Indiana, flat ground plus heavy clay soil means runoff and then flooding although it has been pretty bad this year.

Other places? Well not so much.

I have pretty deep connections to northern Michigan. From my earliest days as a child my family would spend a week or more in Northern Michigan (I define that as the northern portion of the lower peninsula, the Upper Peninsula is a whole other world and it’s own thing) at the cabin of my dad’s best friend and my namesake on the southwest shore of Black Lake. This is me as a baby soaking up some sun on the beach at Black Lake….

When I was older my folks bought their own place on Black Lake, this time on the eastern “bluffs” so their lake house overlooked the lake and pretty much had a daily amazing sunset. I went there on a pretty regular basis with my wife when she was still my girlfriend and then later my dad retired and they moved to the lake permanently.

Around the mid 2000s I moved my family “Up North” and lived in a town called Alanson, north of Petoskey where I worked for a number of years as a bank manager, and we were just about an hour away from Black Lake so we often would go visit my parents. That is a lot of words to say northern Michigan has been in my blood for the better part of half a century.

Recently the heavy rains coupled with the widespread freeze that persists up north has led to some serious problems. In the city of Cheboygan the Cheboygan River has been swelling for some time. There is a lock and dam system on the river but part of it is a hydroplant that was part of a toilet paper mill that has been sitting mostly vacant for as long as I can remember, and I have been going to Cheboygan for a very long time. From what I can tell Proctor & Gamble shuttered the plant in 1990 and it has been defunct ever since.

At one point the water was less than six inches from the top of the dam and that triggered the second stage of the “Ready, Set, Go” evacuation protocol. Efforts finally succeeded to get the hydroelectric plant back online and the flood waters are slowly receding….Hydro plant at embattled Cheboygan Dam back online, water levels starting to drop

This dam has been a ticking time bomb for years: Michigan feared Cheboygan Dam danger for years before rains pushed it to brink

Local, state and federal officials were aware of the dangers posed by the Cheboygan Lock and Dam for years before floodwaters pushed it to the brink of collapse, records show.

Yet they failed to compel private owners to repair the nonfunctional hydro plant connected to the publicly-owned dam — a critical piece of its ability to pass floodwaters downstream.

The facility that houses the plant, once a Charmin toilet paper mill, changed hands repeatedly over decades as it fell into disrepair.

Now taxpayers are helping bankroll a desperate effort to bring the plant back online before the dam fails and sends a wall of water toward downtown Cheboygan….

….Records show the agency that primarily regulates hydropower dams, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, sent warning letters for years to a shifting cast of owners while granting multiple extensions.

Crisis averted for now but the Cheboygan River is the outlet for four different lakes to empty into Lake Huron, Black, Burt, Mullet and Crooked lakes….

With the water backed up, that has led to flooding downstream including at my old stomping grounds of Black Lake…

‘All our hard work washed away’: Homes along Cheboygan County lake are feet underwater

You can see the ice on the lake in the distance….

The bottom picture is just down the road from where I went to Black Lake as a kid. These pictures are pretty upsetting. It isn’t helped by the lake levels being too high going into winter thanks to the Kleber Dam apparently being mismanaged, the dam that manages water flowing into Black Lake.

It isn’t just the Cheboygan Dam: High water has Michigan juggling a growing list of problem dams

The state said it was monitoring more than 20 dams this week and bracing for more trouble once snowmelt accelerates in the Upper Peninsula.

That is very sad and all but so what? Here is the “so what”. The Cheboygan Dam nearly failing, as many as two dozen other Michigan dams in danger of failing, widespread flooding and property damage in northern Michigan is a microcosm of the broader problems all across the United States where infrastructure has been neglected in favor of all sorts of scams and graft.

Last month in Hawaii of all places a 120 year old dam, the Wahiawā Dam also came very close to failing. The state of Hawaii has taken control of the dam but it needs a lot of work: Hawaii to take over aging dam after failure scare during flood evacuations

A 120-year-old Hawaii dam that reached worrisome levels during heavy rains and devastating flooding, prompting thousands of residents to evacuate for fear of life-threatening failure last week, will soon be taken over by the state.

The state’s land board on Friday voted to acquire certain irrigation lands from Dole Food Co., clearing the way for the state to take over the aging dam and move forward on at least $20 million in repairs and an expansion of the spillway.

The earthen structure was built in 1906 to increase sugar production for the Waialua Agricultural Co., which eventually became a subsidiary of Dole Food Co. It was reconstructed following a collapse in 1921.

“Dole is proud to transfer this vital resource to the State of Hawaiʻi at no cost, ensuring its continued use and stewardship in support of agriculture and the broader community,” the company said in a statement after the vote.

Dole was very proud to transfer the dam after the state voted to take it over….

The state has sent Dole four notices of deficiency about the dam since 2009, and five years ago it fined the company $20,000 for failing to address safety deficiencies on time, according to records.

According to the linked story, the flooding caused nearly a billion dollars in damage.

All across the fruited plains, our infrastructure is in awful shape. This isn’t new, America’s infrastructure has been in bad shape for a long time and we are endlessly promised it will get fixed. Remember Barry Soetoro, aka Barack Obama, aka Mr. Michelle “Big Mike” Obama and his “shovel ready” infrastructure jobs promise? It was a big joke and Obama thought it quite amusing in 2011

The White House defended its record Tuesday on the stimulus after facing a heap of criticism over President Obama’s joke a day earlier that “shovel-ready” projects in the stimulus bill weren’t so shovel-ready after all.

The president’s wisecrack came during a meeting in North Carolina with his jobs council. After hearing concerns about how the permitting process delays construction, Obama smiled and said: “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”

Hahahahahahaha! Hilarious stuff Barry you simpering faggot!

The “stimulus” worked exactly as planned…

Last summer, the administration claimed the $830 billion stimulus plan “saved or created” 3.6 million jobs. Though such a claim would be impossible to verify, the shovel-ready projects did not prevent the unemployment from pitching skyward.

The administration had pledged the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent. But the jobless rate has gone from 8.2 percent when Obama signed the stimulus in early 2009 to 9.1 percent last month. The number of employed people in the United States has also fallen by nearly 2 million since that time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

$830 billion pissed into the wind and gone. I am sure lots of community organizers and urban non-profits and minority led firms got rich but the infrastructure of America saw no improvement and kept right on crumbling. The disaster that was the Obama presidency doesn’t get nearly enough attention, thanks to a great deal of cover run for Barry by the fawning media.

It isn’t just obscure dams in small cities in northern Michigan.

A little over two years ago, on March 26th, 2024, a cargo container ship called the MV Dali ran into the Francis Scott Key bridge while being piloted by a pajeet named Chandrashekar Sabhapathy. The entire crew was Indian (pajeet Indian, not scalp ‘em Indian). The bridge, a major artery in Baltimore, was constructed from 1972 to 1977 at a cost in inflation adjusted dollars of $568 million.

You will be surprised to learn it is going to cost a lot more to rebuild it than it did to build it in the first place: Maryland more than doubles cost estimate on rebuilding collapsed Baltimore bridge

Maryland officials have more than doubled the estimated cost to replace Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, which collapsed and killed six construction workers last year after a massive container ship crashed into it, and they’ve added two years on to the projected completion date.

The Maryland Transportation Authority said Monday it is updating its financial forecast to include a price range of between $4.3 billion and $5.2 billion, with an anticipated open-to-traffic date in late 2030. That’s up from a previous estimated cost of $1.9 billion and an opening date of late 2028.

If you think it is going to “only” cost $5.2 billion and be re-opened by 2030, I have a bridge to sell you in Baltimore. Remember Boston’s “Big Dig” project?

The project was originally scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion, US$7.4 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2020. The project was completed in December 2007 at a $14.6 billion, a cost overrun of about 97% when adjusted for inflation.

The whole project was rife with scams and graft on an enormous scale.

OK, so dams are failing, roads are full of potholes, bridges are collapsed and well past the end of the original life expectancy, on and on and on. What can be done about it?

You could fall back on the lolbertarian position and say “muh free market will fix the problem if you let it!”, which is patently silly and one of many reasons you shouldn’t take libertarians seriously. Another is their preteen fan girl level obsession with Argentina’s Javier Milei, seen in a tweet here from this morning Frenching the bullshit “temple” wall in Israel on his third trip to the “Holy Land”…

666 thousand views you say?

That sounds great when you are drinking an IPA and stroking your wispy little whiskers in a cigar lounge but both the Cheboygan locks and the dam in Hawaii were owned by private companies and both were in disrepair.

The problem is that all of our infrastructure is linked together. My county has a drainage board that overseas the network of ditches, tiles and drains that move water from fields and yards into our rivers, rivers that then drain into the Maumee River which flows northeast into Ohio, past my childhood home in Waterville, through Toledo and into Lake Erie.

Building the infrastructure, highways and ditches, power plants and dams, was an gargantuan task and while maintaining them is a lot easier, it becomes way harder if you wait until something fails and then try to fix it after the fact.

That is exactly what we have been doing, infrastructure whack-a-mole. Something fails and we panic and fix it, usually in a half-ass fashion, and then turn around to deal with the next catastrophe. There seems to be plenty of money for bullshit programs like Somali daycares and various other social programs but what about roads and bridges?

Of course it would certainly help if we didn’t spend hundreds of billions on war after war after war….

There should be plenty of money. In my state along, according to Grok via the Indiana Department of Revenue, the total brought in during the last fiscal year was over $2 billion. Despite all of that, roads are bad all across the state, from local roads torn up by the combination of semis on roads not meant to carry them plus buggy traffic (the repeated impact of shod horse hooves striking the roads leaves a visible channel in the pavement), to the highways. Nearby I-469 that loops around Fort Wayne has been under major construction for the entire 15 years we have lived here and the roads in Indianapolis are a disaster, coupled with people driving 20-30 mph over the posted speed limits.

Pothead losers are always claiming on social media that if Indiana would legalize recreational marijuana that the extra revenue would fix the roads but neighboring Michigan and Illinois have legal pot and their roads are just as bad as ever and now you have dopeheads driving around. Michigan drivers are absolutely awful anyway and then you add in pot?

It is a huge problem. Between the graft, shoddy work and outright theft on one hand and the lack of any prioritization on the other, the U.S. infrastructure isn’t so much a ticking time bomb as it is a million small ticking time bombs.

Making it worse, and I mean far worse, there is another far more important kind of infrastructure crumbling in America and it is demographic.

When the Francis Scott Key bridge was constructed, America was 85-90% White. The same is true for other amazing projects like the Mackinac Bridge connecting the Upper and Lower Peninsula of Michigan that opened in 1957. Also true for pretty much everything you can think of when you think of major infrastructure. The interstate highway system, the 140,000 miles of the U.S. freight rail network, our (now badly aging) power grid, bridges and dams and waterways, almost all of them are pretty damn old. It was all built in an era with far less technology but with far better quality people.

Now, the U.S. is rapidly crumbling demographically at the same time our infrastructure is falling apart and I just don’t see how it gets fixed. Building a bridge or a dam is something that is done with the future in mind.

America used to be a nation of people who dreamed big. Those dreams were manifested in some ways by a desire to build great things. We invested in our future as a people, often for the benefit of generations yet to be born.

Do you think that someone like Ilhan Omar thinks about what is best for generations of “Americans” to come? Nah, she is thinking about how to skim as much money as possible from Whites to benefit only her tribe members. People that lack a basic level of impulse control can hardly be expected to make sacrifices now for people they don’t even know and that aren’t even born yet.

This isn’t a post that proposes to solve a problem because I don’t see a solution. Our nation is falling apart at the seams in so many ways and infrastructure is just another facet of the collapse. It should be a warning of course to all of us. Be aware of problematic infrastructure. Are there dams near you that can break? Is your local power grid a disaster waiting to happen?

Like so much of what is happening around us, it is completely out of your control. It is demoralizing and upsetting but that can’t be your focus, and it can’t be mine. As with all of what we see happening you can only find people you can rely on in your area for when, not if, disaster strikes but ultimately remembering that you are your own first responder.