For decades, we’ve been told that this country’s infrastructure is badly in need of investment. Infrastructure first became a household word when it was used extensively by Bill Clinton and Al Gore in their 1992 campaign. After September 11, we began to hear about the imperative of securing critical infrastructure –such as power stations and key bridges. In the spring of 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the US infrastructure a “D” and noted that it would take $1.6 trillion to upgrade it to a “good” level, not counting estimates for infrastructure security needs. (However, in the ensuing four years, funding to build and maintain our infrastructure has actually decreased.)
Following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, there was again much talk about the need to rebuild the infrastructure. The collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in downtown Minneapolis in August 2007 was yet another, painful reminder that our infrastructure is literally crumbling. The disaster did much to raise public awareness of the problem and resulted in a sharp rise in bridge inspections. More recently, Barack Obama has spoken about his commitment to create new jobs through national infrastructure investment. He promised to create a national infrastructure reinvestment bank to expand and enhance federal transportation investments by infusing $60 billion over 10 years, creating up to two million new direct and indirect jobs and stimulating approximately $35 billion per year in new economic activity.
This month, the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) released a white paper titled Infrastructure Interdependencies, the first in a series titled The Geospatial Dimensions of Critical Infrastructure and Emergency Response. GITA, which focuses on advancing the use of geospatial technology to address problems with the infrastructure, defines it as “all fundamental services, activities, and operations that sustain our communities and way of life — from keeping the lights on to creating safe drinking water to responding to an emergency.” This definition includes, inter al., water supply and wastewater systems, energy systems (electric power, oil, and gas), communications, transportation (road, rail, air, and water), education, banking and finance, and emergency and government services.
The white paper lays out the intricate relations between four types of interdependencies:
- Physical — when one infrastructure is physically linked to another. For example, water supply systems require electricity to run the pumps and electric power plants need water to make steam and to cool the equipment.
- Cyber — when the operation of one infrastructure requires information from another.
- Geographic — when two infrastructures are in close geographic proximity. For example, when electric power lines, water and gas pipelines, and telecommunications cables are located along the same right-of-way corridor, which could be in the path of a hurricane or an earthquake.
- Logical — when the state of one infrastructure depends on the state of another, via economic or political links such as the cost of fuel.
Because of these interdependencies, failure in one infrastructure can result in cascading failures in other ones. One stark example was the July 2001 derailment in Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel of a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals, resulting in a fire. “This disaster,” GITA’s white paper says, “in addition to its expected effect on rail system traffic, automobile traffic, and emergency services, caused a cascading degradation of infrastructure components not previously anticipated. For example, the fire in the tunnel caused a water main to break directly above the tunnel. The break also caused localized flooding in the surrounding area. As a direct result of the flooding, an electrical outage affected several thousand Baltimore residences. Fiber optical lines running through the tunnel were also destroyed. This resulted in major disruptions to phone and cell phone service, e-mail service, Web services, and data services to major corporations. Disruption to rail services and its effects on the Middle Atlantic States included delays in coal delivery and also limestone delivery for steel production.”
Geospatial technology’s greatest strength is that it enables us to represent and analyze all of these interdependencies — because they all have a geospatial dimension. Whether an emergency is due to terrorism, natural disaster, or human error, the white paper says, “the methods of responding to, mitigating, and ideally preventing reoccurrences are based on a common approach: the coordinated use of geospatial information.”
Geospatial technologies have a critical role to play in prioritizing, planning, and managing infrastructure investments because they make it dramatically cheaper and more efficient to quantify, analyze, survey, plan, and design the required repairs and upgrades. For example, with regards to transportation, the main goals are to reduce congestion, fuel consumption, and emissions. This requires acquiring and analyzing vast amounts of data all of which has a geographic component — using remote sensing (aerial photography and satellite imagery), vehicle-mounted sensors, GPS receivers and total stations, 3D CAD drawings, and geographic information systems (GIS).
Decision-makers have recently begun to realize that such complex, dynamic, long-term challenges require the improved and more accessible data and the new analytic and collaboration tools that geospatial technologies provide. Fortunately, many state and local governments have already become so reliant on these tools — as have the residents of their jurisdictions — that they are unlikely to cut back their investments on geospatial technologies even in these days of budget cutting and fiscal belt-tightening.
The National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) is pressing for a renewed commitment to completion of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as the “technology, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities necessary to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and preserve spatial data.” According to NSGIC, “a fully implemented NSDI will enable more effective and efficient government through the coordinated stewardship of geographic information and through technologies to ensure that this information will be integrated at all levels of government in support of improved decision-making and business processes.” The NSDI includes seven “framework” map-data layers (geodetic control, transportation, cadastre parcels, administrative boundaries, hydrography, orthoimagery, and topography) that are critical to public safety and homeland security, as well as to a wide variety of other challenges: From conducting the census to protecting critical infrastructure, from resource management to environmental planning and equitable taxation.
Additionally, a national digital cadastre — a database that ties records of legal decisions and transactions (ownership, mortgages, liens, permits, land value, purchase price, taxation, etc.) to digital, property-boundary maps — would have allowed authorities to spot the dangerous trends in the housing market before they became overwhelming. Such an early warning of the crisis would have enabled them to take preventive action, at a small fraction of the cost to taxpayers of the current bailout.
Initiated by Presidential Executive Order about fifteen years ago, the NSDI remains incomplete. The combination of a crumbling infrastructure, the need to create millions of new jobs, the financial crisis, and a new administration searching for fresh approaches makes this the ideal time to complete the job.
By: Matteo Luccio, President, Pale Blue Dot Research, Writing, and Editing, LLC
We can only build a finite amount of roads, bridges and so on – whereas the number of road miles traveled has been on a steady increase. As such, the trick is to manage those assets better, and geospatial technology is definitely key to this.