World view: Out of service—Decaying infrastructure is an urgent threat…

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091216/full/462846a.html

Published online 16 December 2009 | Nature 462, 846 (2009) | doi:10.1038/462846a

Column

World view: Out of service

Decaying infrastructure is an urgent threat that scientists and engineers must help to address, says Colin Macilwain.

Colin Macilwain

The trappings of our civilization, from flushing the toilet to posting flip comments on Twitter, rely on a set of critical infrastructures. Many of these — water systems, transport links, electricity grids and generating plants — are ageing severely in developed countries. And the ones that aren't ageing, such as mobile communications and the Internet, are of unknown resilience.

The sudden collapse of a bridge on Interstate 35 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 1 August 2007, like the cascade power failure that swept the northeastern United States four years earlier, was a portent of what could come to European and Asian nations if they allow their physical infrastructure to deteriorate.

The US power failure also showed the extent to which rich nations' infrastructure has evolved into a complex web of interdependence, which no one has sought to model properly and for which no authority has overall responsibility. Energy supply, for example, is critical to the operation of all the other infrastructures and is itself dependent on water supply and telecoms.

"The major change over the last 50 years has been the gradual, but ultimately seismic, shift" to an interconnected national infrastructure, where "failure in one part has a direct and damaging knock-on effect in others", noted a scathing report on the topic published earlier this year by the UK Council for Science and Technology (CST), the senior science-advisory body to the British government.

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[kestrel91316]

1. Who the hell needs infrastructure? We've got more important things to

spend on, like WAR. And bailouts for banking criminals.