Simpson Column: Sitting on a ticking time bomb

We are sitting on a ticking financial time bomb. I'm not talking about the fact that over the next 10 years, $600 billion of every annual federal budget will be dedicated to paying interest on the national debt. And I'm not talking about the recent $1.9 trillion increase in our debt ceiling, which means that we owe 40 cents of every dollar to China.

While the Democratic congress is hard at work trying to add yet another New Deal/Great Society financially devastating social(ist) program on us with the health care bill, one of the more legitimate government responsibilities -- America's infrastructure -- is slowly (and literally) rotting away beneath us.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), our nation's infrastructure is in extraordinarily bad shape. Many of our sewers, bridges and dams are at the end of their design lifespan, or well beyond.

The ASCE produced a national report card of America's current infrastructure problems, a few of the grades were: Bridges C; Dams D; Drinking Water D-; Energy D+; Roads D-; Schools D; Solid Waste C+; Wastewater D-; with an overall national GPA of D. They estimate we need to spend over $2.2 trillion over the next five years alone to keep up with the aging deterioration of these critical systems.

Instead of spending billions of dollars building new high- speed railways, hundreds of billions of dollars in green technology research, and trillions of dollars on nationalized health care, we need to be spending money on fixing our eroding infrastructure problems.

In Virginia, according to the ASCE, 26 percent of Virginia's bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete; 125 dams are in need of rehabilitation to meet applicable state dam safety standards; and 23 percent of Virginia's roads are in poor or mediocre condition. And these are just a few of a rapidly growing list of infrastructure deficiencies in Virginia.

My family lives in the Bailey's Crossroads area on the border of Alexandria and Fairfax. In the past couple years the gas company has been out on three separate occasions to repair leaks due to corroded natural gas lines. On the first two trips they dug up the yard, and most recently the repair required a portion of road to be excavated. (They were in such a rush to get to their next service call that the crew actually hit the house with the backhoe causing structural damage, which the gas company refused to repair … and both times they dug up the yard they left it a wreck -- but I digress.)

The gas leaks serve as an example of how backlogged these infrastructure problems are -- during the most recent call to the gas company, they came out to inspect the report of a natural gas smell. Confirming that it was a leaking pipe, it took them OVER A MONTH to actually come back and repair the corroding pipe, which was not only leaking underneath the asphalt, but in a neighbors front yard as well.

Scenes like the one in December 2008, where a 66-inch water main break in Bethesda, Md., caused motorists to be trapped in their cars, are only going to become more numerous as our infrastructure continues aging while our government spends money it doesn't have on programs that are outside of its legitimate charter.

Many of the bridges, roads and sewer systems are not only reaching the end of their expected service life, but they were never designed to take the load that they are under due to the significant increase in population since they were originally built.

According to ASCE, Europe spends five percent of its GDP in infrastructure, and China spends nine percent. In the United States we are only devoting 2.4 percent of our GDP toward our infrastructure. This is not good in the rapidly growing global competitive market.

The economic problem goes well beyond the cost of infrastructure repair alone. There will be billions of dollars in lost productivity -- due to planned repair and unexpected failures. It is going bad enough that many roads will be closed and businesses will be negatively impacted during overdue repairs or replacement of so many of our utility and infrastructure systems; what will be worse is the loss of life and the economic impact the longer we wait. Can we really afford more tragedies like the 2007 bridge collapse in Minnesota that killed 13 people?

We can't keep increasing taxes and borrowing or printing money to address such needs. Our governments (local, state and federal) aren't fulfilling the legitimate mission of maintaining our infrastructure -- the burden of new social(ist) programs must stop!

James Simpson lives in Lake Ridge.