“Mr. President, in my home State of Delaware today we have a problem. Just this week the critical I-495 bridge over the Christina River in Wilmington–which carries more than 90,000 drivers each and every day, north and south on this critical artery on the east coast of the United States–was closed indefinitely”, said Senator Coons.
On June 5, 2014 Senator Chris Coons of Delaware asked for and was granted time to address the United States Senate for a few minutes regarding American’s failing infrastructure.
What he exampled in his speech was rather shocking:
“Mr. President, in my home State of Delaware today we have a problem. Just this week the critical I-495 bridge over the Christina River in Wilmington–which carries more than 90,000 drivers each and every day, north and south on this critical artery on the east coast of the United States–was closed indefinitely.
While engineers and workers were on an unrelated project in the area, they noticed that four of the key pillars holding up the bridge were alarmingly slanted, causing widespread concerns about the bridge’s safety and prompt action to shut it down.
Now as the Delaware Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration do everything they can to get to the bottom of this problem and to work to make this bridge safe again, tens of thousands of commuters are forced onto already crowded streets and highways, creating even worse traffic for everyone in our area, hurting our economy, and taking people away from where they need to be.
It is, sadly, yet another example–one that hits particularly close to home for me–in a string of major infrastructure emergencies, some due to unforeseeable events, and some due to a long-term critical lack of investment that signifies why investment in our infrastructure is so important.
Every day when Americans drive to work or drop off their kids at school, they make a simple bargain, an unconscious bargain with their government: They assume the roads will be safe to drive on. They expect that if they drive safely, they will be able to get to where they need to go in a reasonable amount of time.
Unfortunately, it has been quite clear that while Americans keep doing what they can to move our Nation and our economy forward, we here in Congress aren’t holding up our end of the bargain. We aren’t meeting our responsibilities to invest in critical areas that we all know need work. We have a lot of infrastructure needs, but we simply aren’t keeping up with them today.
This is about the end of the school year for most families with kids in school around the country. Like many other parents, I was going over with my kids what they think their grades are at the end of the year. Well, the country also gets a grade. We get a grade from the American Society for Civil Engineers. These are the folks whose job it is to manage and supervise and survey the health and capabilities of our infrastructure–our bridges and roads and highways. This group, the American Society for Civil Engineers, gave our roadways a D.
The Federal Highway Administration estimates that we are dramatically behind in investing in keeping our highways and bridges and tunnels up to speed. They say we need $170 billion more in capital investments every year to improve road conditions and performance.
That group of civil engineers, the ASCE, has also determined a quarter of our bridges are functionally obsolete or structurally deficient. In little old Delaware, that comes to 175 bridges that fail to meet what we would all expect of our government–Federal and State and county and local governments–that we maintain bridges to the highest level of safety that we would expect”, said Senator Coons (source: Congressional Record http://thomas.loc.gov/).
Senator Coons currently serves on four key committees during the 113th Congress — Appropriations, Foreign Relations, Budget and Judiciary. He is arguably one of the more influential Senators in Congress.
See related video: Leaning Columns Keep I-495 Bridge closed in Delaware http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og4qCIYjkdc