Climate change is real and it’s going to make infrastructure around the country even worse than it already is. At least, that’s according to experts who say that a warming planet is going to make bridges crumble.
The New York Times reports that experts in fields across the country are pointing out just how much climate change is going to affect our nation’s bridges. Paul Chinowsky, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder called what’s happening a “bridge crisis.”
We have a bridge crisis that is specifically tied to extreme weather events. These are not things that would happen under normal climate circumstances. These are not things that we’ve ever seen at this rate.
The problem, as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg pointed out, is that many of these bridges were made decades ago with materials that weren’t meant to stand up to the intense heat and storms that we experience today. “It’s one of the forms of infrastructure that takes the longest to update or refresh. And yet we’re seeing those vulnerabilities everywhere across the country,” he told the Times.
An alarming study by PLOS ONE says that by 2050 “…one in four steel bridges in the United States” will collapse. Some of these failures have already started. In 2015, a span of the I-10 bridge collapsed in Texas due to record rainfall. In 2022 another 30-foot piece of an I-10 bridge at the California-Arizona border collapsed due to rainfall. More recently, a bridge in Oshkosh, Wisconsin had to close in June after record heat caused the expansion of one of the bridge’s bolts.
The New York Times says officials across the country are acting to allocate funding to repair bridges before something disastrous happens while the Biden Administration is giving states over $8 billion to work with for infrastructure repair. Head on over to the New York Times to read the rest of the disturbing reality of how climate change will affect our infrastructure.