Schwarz
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Her facts are frightening. Here's a small sample:
More than 160,000 US bridges are structurally deficient or obsolete.
There are 1,237 toxic waste sites in the United States.
The cost of returning US schools to an acceptable physical condition is $286 billion.
The cost of making aging drinking-water systems safe is $11 billion.
The National Park Service estimates its maintenance backlog at $6.1 billion.
The number of unsafe dams, a potential threat to human life, rose by one third in the last decade.
Most of these numbers are taken from independent studies by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Goldhagen published these and other facts in a recent article in The New Republic magazine, which is where I first learned of her interest in infrastructure. Summing up, the ASCE estimates that the cost of bringing US infrastructure up to a minimum acceptable standard is, oh, about $1.6 trillion.