America's infrastructure a crisis of inequity: article

NEW YORK, Sept. 13 (Xinhua) -- Infrastructure maintenance and replacement haven't been happening in many parts of the United States, while increasingly, extreme heat and storms are putting roads, bridges, water systems and other infrastructure under stress in the country, said an article published by Popular Science last week.

Two recent examples -- an intense heat wave that pushed California's power grid to its limits in September 2022, and the failure of the water system in Jackson, Mississippi, amid flooding in August -- show "how a growing maintenance backlog and increasing climate change are turning the 2020s and 2030s into a golden age of infrastructure failure," it said.

The United States is consistently falling short on funding infrastructure maintenance. A report by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker's Volcker Alliance in 2019 estimated the country has a 1 trillion U.S. dollars backlog of needed repairs, according to the article.

"Over 220,000 bridges across the country -- about 33 percent of the total -- require rehabilitation or replacement," it said, noting that "a water main break now occurs somewhere in the United States every two minutes, and an estimated 6 million gallons of treated water are lost each day."

"This is happening at the same time the western United States is implementing water restrictions amid the driest 20-year span in 1,200 years. Similarly, drinking water distribution in the United States relies on over 2 million miles of pipes that have limited life spans," it added.