Wherefore Art the Widgets?

This article deals with the issue of whether nations need a National Infrastructure Database to prepare for the possibly severe infrastructure management challenges that will manifest themselves as we move past peak oil and head down the post-peak downslope. It was suggested by Geoff Holman of Australia, for which I thank him. Ah, the wonders of the worldwide web. May it last long and prosper. It has made this peak oil dialogue truly global, which it needs to be but which would have been very difficult to accomplish without the internet.

Also see my other articles in this blog on infrastructure;

Peak Oil and the Three Sisters of Social Collapse
Peak oil and overpasses
The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance
Post Peak Dam Maintenance, or Lack Thereof
Our Dangerous Infrastructure
Cascade Failure in River Systems with Multiple Dams
Our Dangerous Infrastructure II

Infrastructure is generally seen as - and loudly proclaimed by politicians and the captains of industry as being - a societal facilitator. In thefreedictionary.com it is described thus; "The term infrastructure has been used since 1927 to refer collectively to the roads, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy, or a portion of it, to function."[6] And investorwords.com defines it as "The basic physical systems of a country's or community's population, including roads, utilities, water, sewage, etc. These systems are considered essential for enabling productivity in the economy."[7]

But what happens when the ability to maintain that infrastructure disappears and the infrastructure becomes a hindrance rather than a facilitator, such as it will do during the probable long, grinding economic decline accompanying peak oil? When the current infrastructure maintenance professionals begin retiring or dying and aren't being replaced because of ever-tighter budget constraints, who will even know in a broad context what all is included in "infrastructure", where it is, what condition it is in, when it was built, how old it is, how long it should last, what maintenance it needs and when?

Will the same politicians who built their election campaigns around throwing up new feel-good infrastructure be as quick to accept the responsibility for ensuring it's maintenance as the global economy falls into serious, terminal decline? The paper, Deconstructing the Manifest has this take, "of course, maintenance of these "public" projects is left to the public. .....no politician could ever successfully run on a platform of "maintenance" or status quo. The public will is not swayed by the mundane. And so we see our roads and bridges decay, slowly, inexorably,..... Truly comprehensive maintenance is simply too expensive....."[12]

The reality is, as well as facilitating an economy, infrastructure is also a limiting factor for that economy, a constraint. The infrastructure defines the limits within which an economy can effectively function and, more importantly, evolve, adapt and change. For the economy to shift direction, as it must surely do on the peak oil downslope, it suddenly finds that its infrastructure is an impediment. The walls that enclosed and secured the fortified cities of medieval Europe, for example, were a serious constraint as those cities sought to expand and open up as the Industrial Revolution swept across the continent. The established infrastructure of any city suddenly becomes an impediment when that city wants to install rail lines or highways or subways linking the city center with the suburbs and areas beyond. The destruction of the infrastructure of so many European and Asian cities during two world wars, in reality, facilitated the rebirth of those cities around new infrastructure, saved those cities the agonizing decisions and complications of replacing and upgrading their infrastructure to satisfy and facilitate the drastically changed needs of a technology-oriented, growth-driven, post-war society.

The strong probability is that the infrastructure needed and maintainable by a post-fossil-fuel or seriously fossil-fuel-deficient society will be as different from today as today's infrastructure is different from that which existed in pre-industrial Europe. In the past, however, the impediment imposed by seriously outdated and unmaintainable infrastructure was handled by demolishing and replacing that old infrastructure with new. But will this be an option still open to us if we wait until we are on the peak-oil downslope before we start to address the infrastructure needs of the future? We will no longer have the exploitable energy, technology, finances and vast quantities of raw materials needed for wholesale replacement of that infrastructure. The only options left open to us if we sleepwalk into peak oil may narrow down to trying to somehow maintain that crumbling infrastructure in perpetuity or simply doing without as it falls apart. But infrastructure doesn't just shrivel up benignly in the sun like a tomato dropped from the vine. As infrastructure crumbles through age and lack of maintenance it can impose very serious risks on society that could, collectively, jeopardize millions of lives over the balance of this century and beyond.

Geoff Holman, a reader of this blog from Australia, as noted above, graciously suggested an article on the question of building a national infrastructure database to serve as the basis for dealing with the massive infrastructure inventory during the declining economy that will likely occur beginning with peak oil and the downslope beyond. Not surprisingly, various attempts at building national infrastructure databases have been made in the past.

One of the first projects, for example, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, formed following the terrorist attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001, was the establishment of a Critical Infrastructure Database. This database was intended as a reference source of all U.S. infrastructure considered critical and susceptible to terrorist attack, infrastructure like nuclear power plants, major dams, water systems of large urban centers like New York, airports, and so on.

Like so many projects begun in the bowels of bureaucracy, the design of this database and the data collected for it was, at best, fuzzy and incomplete. An assessment report issued by the U.S. Inspector General's office in July, 2006 turned out to be a blistering critique. The Inspector General's report cited several deep flaws in the database that underlies the plan, including: "The database’s failure to distinguish the criticality of the approximately 77,000 assets it includes; The database's failure to provide a comprehensive picture of national assets; The need to develop more sophisticated tools to assess risks associated with various assets; The need for substantial additional work to complete the database. ..... The IG report specified multiple flaws that arose in the process of building the database, such as missing ZIP codes, missing facility names and language translation problems. At one point, “officials estimated that on average each [critical infrastructure/key asset] record they researched was missing information for about seven fields,” according to the report. Department officials progressively improved the methods of gathering and processing the data over the past three years, the report added. The IG analysts predicted that the database could eventually grow to hundreds of thousands of records."[11] Another report notes, "Among the critical assets in the database are Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, a Kangaroo Conservation Center, Jay’s Sporting Goods, several Wal-Mart stores, Amish Country Popcorn, and the Sweetwater Flea Market."[9] Partly as a result of the criticisms the database has been morphed into a National Asset Database but the fuzzy design, structure and data-gathering procedures still persist[8].

Whether or not the failings and criticism of the Critical Infrastructure Database/National Asset Database are responsible, the U.S. congress has recently introduced legislation taking another shot at a National Infrastructure Database. "The Dodd-Hagel National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2007 is a bipartisan measure that addresses the critical needs of our nation’s major infrastructure systems. The legislation establishes a new method through which the Federal government can finance infrastructure projects of substantial regional or national significance more effectively with public and private capital. ..... Infrastructure projects that come under the Bank’s consideration are publicly-owned mass transit systems, housing properties, roads, bridges, drinking water systems, and wastewater systems." The focus here, however, is still largely that of future infrastructure projects rather than maintenance of that already in place. Analysts and critics of this new bill, such as the American Society of Civil Engineers, note that "the current condition of our nation’s major infrastructure systems earns a grade point average of D and jeopardizes the prosperity and quality of life of all Americans." According to the Environmental Protection Agency, "$151 billion and $390 billion is needed respectively every year over the next 20 years to repair obsolete drinking water and wastewater systems. Drinking water and wastewater systems range in age from 50 to 100 years in age."[1] One wonders whether any database resulting from this effort will prove any more successful than that of the Department of Homeland Security.

A long, thirty-year career of designing and building information systems, almost always incorporating a database, has taught me that any database is as good as the ingenuity built into the design. Going back after the fact and trying to resurrect a poorly-designed, disfunctional database through retrofitting patches simply further exacerbates the problems and leads to the almost certain demise of the database, like retrofitting new extraction technology to a played-out oil well. Databases, unlike living organisms, do not evolve well. Any database, especially one as potentially complex as a national infrastructure database, needs to have considered in it's design; the motivation behind the database's existence, the breadth of data to be included, the depth of data the database can support, the data relationships to be incorporated which seriously impacts the flexibility, the controls on the purity and veracity of the data gathered, the uses the database is intended to satisfy, the ownership of and responsibility for the data contained, and much, much more. The fuzzy thinking and lack of clarity of potential use of the database that has characterized various government efforts at national infrastructure databases (not just that elaborated above) is and will, in my view, continue to be a drawback of institutional and bureaucratic control over the design and operational management of such databases. And yet I am not, for a moment, suggesting that any such national infrastructure database be privatized and handed over to business and industry. That, in my opinion, would burden such an effort with a purely business-centric, economic motivation rather than gearing it to the societal need it should serve.

For any nation to set out on a course of developing a national infrastructure database designed to help manage the infrastructure inventory on the peak oil downslope and transition into a post-peak, post-fossil-fuel age they must surely first recognize peak oil and the impact it will have on infrastructure maintenance. And considering the amount of feeding from the public trough that will be involved in the design and construction of such a database and the massive drain on public finances that will be involved in mitigating the impact of that decaying infrastructure while the national and global economy implodes, that is going to be an extremely difficult sell. It is an impossible sell when that government will not even utter the words peak oil but insists on perpetuating the myth of the steady growth economy.

There is no question, in my mind at least, that the massive, technology-dependent infrastructure on which our modern society is built is going to be a tremendous and dangerous liability on the peak oil downslope. I simply do not believe, however, and I hope that I am wrong, that any workable database could be developed at this late stage in the game, even if the political will were there to develop it, that could help mitigate the problem. Any such database is itself going to be dependent on a technology and infrastructure that may not survive long enough for the database to be a viable tool during the developing criticality of infrastructure decline. I for one, therefore, will not be joining and grassroots movement to demand that government build such a database. Sorry.

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1) NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE BANK ACT OF 2007
Senator Christopher J. Dodd and Senator Chuck Hagel
2) User Friendly Electronic Database Management System for Infrastructure Maintenance in Small Cities
3) British Virgin Islands Infrastructure and Utilities Broad Policy
4) The Age of Infrastructure
5) Definitions of Infrastructure on the Web:
6) Infrastructure
7) infrastructure
8) Critical Infrastructure: The National Asset Database
9) Critical infrastructure database full of useless junk
10) National Infrastructure Coordinating Center INSight Application
11) DHS asset database can't support vaunted infrastructure protection plan
12) Deconstructing the Manifest

Peak Oil and the Three Sisters of Social Collapse

Three of the fundamental and basic human needs - food, water and shelter - have in the past century all become critically and increasingly dependent on technology and the fossil fuels that power it - at least in the developed world but also to a lesser and growing extent in the underdeveloped and developing world. These three needs will, as we pass peak oil, become the three sisters of global but uneven social collapse. Peak oil alone would make that a serious problem but they are also each going to be heavily impacted by the progression of anthropogenic or man-made global warming. Both of these serious global problems, it now appears, will occur at roughly the same time, seriously increasing the risk in these three critical areas. The whole in this case is definitely greater than the sum of the parts.


The predominant focus of debate around the peak oil issue is still, unfortunately, centered on energy itself; endless debate over when oil will peak; obfuscation over sweet versus sour versus synthetic crude, debate over the minutiae of various alternative energy options; the price of gasoline/petrol, etc. That is as much a form of denial within the peak oil community as that practiced by energy executives, politicians and the mainstream media. Peak oil is not about the oil! Focusing on the energy itself is safe, makes one appear to be aware and involved while successfully avoiding dealing with the disastrous implications of that peak and decline. Keeping the focus on energy is a self-perpetuating debate by setting up easy deniability for energy executives and their paid-for politicians, allowing them to attack the variability and imprecision in the various peak oil estimates. That in turn facilitates their continuing the climate of endless disinformation that easily serves as a smokescreen and a roadblock to beginning the increasingly critical process of preparing for the transition away from fossil fuels, a process that should have begun with the 1970s oil shocks if not earlier when the concept of peak oil was first introduced by M. King Hubbert in the 1950s.

But that transition is not or should not simply be a question of finding a workable alternative for our profligate use of oil and the other fossil fuels to power our modern society in the style to which we have become accustomed. That is, or should be, an impossible dream. Put simply, how could we move a world consisting of 6.6+billion people, 1+billion automobiles, hundreds of millions of trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships and heavy equipment, trillions of dollars of energy-dependant infrastructure and 300,000+ products at least partially made from or derived from oil and other fossil fuels into an era of declining fossil fuels that will be effectively devoid of those fossil fuels (from an EROEI perspective) within a century without impacting that society? The answer? We can't. As we approach peak oil, however (if we have not already arrived there and moved beyond it, as I believe we have), rather than dealing with that question and getting on with the transition and the massive and sometimes traumatic changes it will entail, we continue to increase our reliance on fossil energy and technology in these three areas of basic need.

The bulk of the food produced in the world today (and the foundation of the artificial carrying capacity, created as part of the Green Revolution, on which our massive surplus population survives) is very much dependant on heavy duty agricultural machinery driven by fossil fuels, massive applications of artificial fertilizers and pesticides produced from fossil fuels, on energy-intensive GMO seeds (as much as 70% of the crops we eat are now produced using GMO seeds), on the major, energy-intensive global distribution network that gets them to the farmers and the food they produce to your table, and on irrigation facilitated through powerful, fossil-energy-dependant pumps extracting water from both surface water (lakes and rivers) and groundwater (aquifers) sources (globally 70-75% of our freshwater usage is for agricultural irrigation). The building global food crisis - food riots have already occurred in several countries such as Egypt and Haiti and are probable in many more as this year progresses, and in many of the world's poorest nations food purchases already consume 50-90% of the average person's meagre income - is not so much a problem of insufficient food or even insufficient land on which to grow it. The problem is rapidly decreasing global agricultural productivity, a result of a staggering annual global loss of topsoil from erosion, toxification and salinity and a rapidly growing deficiency in soil fertility, largely a result of industrialized, petrochemical-intensive agriculture and decades of serious overcropping.

Soil fertility is produced by millions of soil micro-organisms which are all being decimated by our profligate and dangerous overuse of agrochemicals. Soil erosion and other forms of land degradation, in fact, now rob the world of 70-140,000 square kilometers per year of farm land. The total world availability of topsoil is estimated at 7,000 gigatonnes - about seventy years of topsoil at current rates of destruction and loss according to a U.N. estimate. The peak slaughter of these critical soil organisms will occur concurrent with peak oil and at the same time, therefore, that our global need for natural soil fertility will begin a dramatic increase. Globally, food availability, especially for the poor - the global emergency food grain reserve, as I detailed in my article Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity, has shrunk over this past decade from a marginal 120 day supply to a sub-critical 53-55 day supply [5] - is further exacerbated by the rapid increase in meat consumption in the world's major developing nations like India and China and in the frantic push toward biofuels in the rich, western nations, biofuels being produced from those already diminishing global stocks of food grains.

The vast majority of new water and irrigation projects in this past half century have been reliant on the use of powerful pumps to extract water from underground aquifers (many of which are non-replenishable, like the heavily-exploited Ogallala Aquifer in the U.S. midwest, and the majority of which are being drawn down at levels well above their replenishment rate - many of the world's major aquifers, both replenishable and non-replenishable, are declining by more than twenty feet per year), desalination plants heavily dependant on fossil fuels (this same desalination technology may soon have to be used on water drawn from coastal aquifers, like those in many nations in the middle east, which are becoming increasingly contaminated from saltwater intrusion because of excessive drawdown), powerful, energy-intensive irrigation equipment for irrigating large monoculture fields, desperate increases in agricultural development in arid areas, marginal lands and even deserts. It is a common fallacy, particularly in most of Europe and North America, to think that our supplies of fresh water are somewhat infinite. The reality is, as the report UN Highlights World Water Crisis outlines, "Despite the fact that 75 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh water, and three-quarters of that is locked up in glaciers and permanent snow cover. Only 0.3 percent of the water is surface water, found in rivers and lakes. The rest is buried deep in the ground."[6] The general lack of awareness of the limits of earth's easily-accessible freshwater resources leads to dangerous over-exploitation and abuse. Imagine the energy crisis we would be looking at if only 2.5% or 0.3% of the oil in the world were accessible, recoverable and usable and the cornucopean energy executives had been reassuring us for decades that it was all recoverable. It wouldn't much matter if there were people saying this wasn't true and that a crisis is coming. There is an unfortunate tendency for people to believe - and even go out of their way to find - those who are telling them what they want to hear, that there is no problem.

The infrastructure (using the broadest, social definition of infrastructure) on which our modern societies are so dependant (including the homes in which we live) has primarily been constructed in the past half century, most of it with a designed life span of fifty to seventy-five years (will all of those mass-produced McMansions really last that long?), built of materials that are derived from or dependant on fossil fuels, and requiring heavy fossil fuel inputs in their maintenance, upkeep and demolition. "There's a tremendous need," said Larry Roth, a professional engineer who is deputy executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers. "Not only are we not keeping pace with growth, but we're not keeping pace with the maintenance that's required. As a result, our infrastructure is simply crumbling."[1] Most of this infrastructure will achieve and surpass its designed life span just as we pass peak oil when the natural resources (Mike Stasse, owner and moderator of ROEOZ, in his excellent paper, What Went Wrong, calls it natural capital) to replace it will no longer be available, when the energy, materials, finances, trained people resources and technology required to maintain it will no longer be available, and even when the technology and resources to decommission or demolish it are becoming increasingly unavailable (how do you tear down a fifty storey steel and glass tower before it falls down, or decommission a massive dam before it collapses and possibly kills hundreds of thousands or even millions of people?). The costs of infrastructure maintenance, always underestimated, are sobering. “We have a major infrastructure problem in this country,” said Maureen L. McAvey, an executive vice president with the Urban Land Institute, which recently published a report on global infrastructure issues. “The civil engineers have estimated that we have a $1.7 trillion shortfall in this country [U.S.A.] alone”[2]. And the growth of this deficit is very likely to accelerate as the growth economy grinds to a halt. Maintenance is almost invariably the first place that budget managers look for cuts when finances get tight.

Much of the money that needs to be spent on preparing our society for life beyond fossil fuels in the areas of food production, water usage and infrastructure maintenance, replacement, decommissioning and rebuilding, is being drained off paying for the increasing cost of supporting our car-centric mobility and our energy-dependant lifestyle. Oil prices - as well as the cost of other fossil fuels and the cost of almost everything as everything is at least partially dependent on the cost of oil and other fossil fuels - have increased dramatically over these past several years as we are increasingly dependent on more expensive and more technologically-challenging sources of energy. Shawn McCarthy, in his Toronto Globe & Mail Report on Business article, Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war, writes, "The average cost of producing a barrel of oil has more than doubled in the past eight years, with most of that increase occurring in the past four, he[Matt Simmons] said."[3] The fossil-energy story doesn't end at oil, however. Natural gas is also fast approaching peak and prices are increasing in lockstep with the price of oil. And Richard Heinberg reports, in his article Burning the Furniture, "A soon-to-be-released study by the Energy Watch Group in Germany [the report has now been released] on the future of global coal supplies has implications so surprising and far-reaching that energy policymakers may take years to digest it. ..... The report’s central conclusion is that minable global coal reserves are much smaller than is commonly thought, and that a peak in world coal production is likely within only ten to fifteen years."[4]

Much of the misinformation and disinformation surrounding these three primary issues centers on the complexity of quantity versus quality. GMO crops, despite constant claims otherwise, produced with massive applications of artificial fertilizers and bombarded with herbicides and pesticides simply do not have either the taste or nutritional value of natural foods produced with non-chemical, organic methods. GMO seeds, particularly with the boost of global climate change, may produce larger plants and higher yields per acre but the result is like sugar- and salt-laden snack foods. The bulk is there but they are devoid of nutritional value. Like those snack foods, the more you eat the hungrier you get. The world is also lapsing into a global food allergy crisis as our digestive and immune systems struggle to adapt to relying on these unnatural foods for our nutrition.

Over one fifth of the global population today do not have access to clean drinking water. As many as a quarter of the deaths in poor third world countries is caused by water borne diseases, most commonly and crtically dehydration from diahrea caused by contaminated water. Another one fifth of the world's population only have access to one quarter to one tenth the amount of drinking water that the U.N. has established as the daily minimum requirement, and not enough water for basic hygienne. This problem worsens with each passing year. It is estimated that the majority of the global population increase over the next half century will be in areas already struggling with critical water shortages.

The glut of infrastructure development over this past half century has neglected durability and survivability in favour of speed, ease and cost reduction of construction. Sprawling suburbs of cookie-cutter houses and strip malls have grown like a cancer outward from established urban centers which are all expanding outward toward each other, gobbling up the low-density rural spaces between them. Cities have rapidly evolved over this past century into morbidly obese mega-cities covering thousands of square kilometers of concrete entombment.

It is difficult for many to understand why and how food, water and infrastructure can form the foundation of global social collapse without first gaining an understanding of the individual contributors to that collapse, the small details and problems which by themselves may seem meaningless but when combined together do build to a monumental crisis that can and will engulf the entirety of global society. This is further complicated by a general and understandable uncertainty as to the relative timing of peak oil and the subsequent decline in oil and other fossil fuels and the progression of global waming/climate change. But variability in timing ultimately affects only the severity of the challenges at any point in time. The following is by no means intended as a complete list of these problem areas but rather a representative sample.

....Over this past half century the vast majority of small, regional seed companies (many specializing in maintaining rare varieties of crop seeds) have disappeared, gobbled up by multinational companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont and others. This has resulted in a rapid decline in genetic diversity as these large multinationals focus on their favourite varieties on the basis of business economics. It has also, however, made seed production a centralized industry dependent on the global distribution system, often with global seed production concentrated in either the northern or southern hemisphere, out of sync with the seasonal seed needs of the other hemsphere. This has made global agriculture and the seeds on which it relies a handmaiden of the global economy and, with centralized production and global distribution, the global energy situation. It's not just a question of reactivating and regrowing the small regional seed companies. The biodiversity of the available seed line will not be sufficient to accomodate the needs of regional climate and soil diversity. The risk and impact of crop loss with an increasingly limited global emergency food reserves is often discussed. Rarely considered, however, is the globalization of that risk if the crops being lost are the seed production of these centralized seed production companies. A major crop loss in one area, without redundancy built into the global seed production system, could suddenly wipe out the needed seed supply of much of the world. Similarly, with the drastic reduction of crop biodiversity under the control of multinational seed companies, the risk of a sudden susceptibility of a particular, widely-used variety of crop could leave much of the world with no usable fall-back variety.

....Global demand for food crops continues to rise. This is due to continued increases in the global population (more mouths to feed), global changes in food and nutrition requirements (more people turning to meat as their source of protein), more and more food crops being diverted to the production of biofuels. The problem arises from the fact that the demand for the resources required to grow that food do not rise at the same rate. While the population has tripled over the past century the usage of fresh water ras risen over six fold and the water for agriculture over eight fold. In the past twenty five years alone global use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides has grown by an amazing thirty-three times. The amount of energy involved in food production has grown exponentially over this past century to the point that for every calorie of food energy produced and consumed more than ten calories or energy input Are required. Food miles traveled by food produced has gone through the stratosphere this past half century with food travelling now more thasn 1500 miles between field and table. Topsoil loss has grown dramatically over this past have century because of serious overcropping, erosion from irrigation and bare-field tillage, losses due to chemical toxicity and salination. Resource consumption and depletion involved in producing those ever greater quantities of food, therefore, is dramatically greater than the additional food produced.

....There was a time not that long ago when for practically ever farmer, regardless of the crop produced, saving and storing his own seed was still standard practice, and more recently still was in the underdeveloped and developing world. This localised, cultural practice of seed saving was a key component of food crop biodiversity around the world, with local varieties of the same crop genetically evolving independent of the same crop in other parts of the world. With the insidious spread of GMO seeds this critical component of biodiversity is disappearing. Everyone in agriculture knows the tremendous cost and complexity of taking on the big multinational seed companies when their seed cops invade your property and accuse you of saving seeds from their crop when your own crop has been cross-contaminated from crops of neighbouring farmers using their patented seeds. The use of GMO seeds is so ubiquitous that the ability to prevent cross-contamination of your own crop, a product of generation after generation of careful seed saving, is very slim. Often their own carefully-saved seed turns out to be sterile after cross-contamination from a GMO containing a terminator gene, a gene inserted to prevent the plant from producing seed or to cause it to produce a sterile seed so the plant can't be reproduced from its own seed, this securing the dependence of the farmer on the seed company. Even those farmers who are trying to hold out against the seed giants are finding their crops contaminated and the courts consistently come down in favour of the big multinational seed giants.

....With the bulk of modern agricultural crops being produced from GMO seeds restrictively produced in one area of the world and shipped all around the world from that one point, the production of the world's food is becoming rapidly and increasingly dependent on the health of the global economic system. This will make the next depression, when it happens, so much different from any past depression. In severe economic downturns of the past, or in times of war and heavy civil unrest, people would quickly revert to producing their own food and this was very often the key to surviving the hard times. Even if you have a crop today, the chances of your continuing to produce a crop in the event of a severe economic downturn or social chaos are extremely slim because your crop probably will not produce a usable seed and the seed company will very likely have fallen on hard times as the economy implodes. Where is the food to come from if no one is saving seeds, the small regional seed companies no longer exist, and the multinational seed companies that produce all the seed and the global distribution system that gets them to the farmer go out of business in an economic downturn?

....The bulk of the commercially produced food crops in the world (as opposed to the personal garden) are produced with the use of specialized, heavy farm equipment. With the exception of some of the equipment available in some third world nations, the equipment needed for small scale farming, the equipment meant to be used with human or animal power alone, the equipment that our ancestors used a century ago simply no longer exists, nor do the companies and the manufacturing equipment to produce it. Most of us have seen a piece or two of such equipment rusting beside a barn or planted with flowers on a suburban lawn. If the coming energy-decline economic downturn is very slow and very gradual and business, industry and government act with foresight, and the raw resources to do so are available, it is possible that the production of such equipment can be revitalized and ramped up in time to prevent an economic recession or depression turning into a critical global food crisis. That is a lot of ifs that are extremely unlikely to all come together in the right way and at the right time.

....There is an old and, at one time, frequently used expression that somewhat pinpoints the agricultural crisis that awaits us on the other side of peak oil: dirt farmer. Today's farmers are mostly chemical farmers and machine operators (I apologize to any legitimate dirt farmers who take umbrage with that generalization). When the fertilizers and pesticides are no longer available and the tractor and combine and electric milking system no longer function most of today's farmers will be as ill-equipped for farming as the person born, raised, and having spent their entire lives in the inner city. It is a common fallacy to think that when the machinery stops running we'll revert to labour-intensive manual farming as more and more people get involved, as workers, in the production of the food they consume. But who is to teach them what to do? Who is to teach them how to work a field of crops without the aid of machinery? Who is to show them the difference between a seedling of a food plant and the sprout of a weed? At the beginning of the last century as much as 50% of the population were involved in the production of food. Today that is less than 2%. Getting from here to non-chemical, non-mechanized, non-industrial, labour-intensive farming is going to take decades of rebuilding the skills and knowledge bases that will be needed. Trying to do this on the other side of peak oil, when the ability to absorb years or decades of non-productive trial and error doesn't exist, could be truly devestating.

....Along with the disappearance of local seed companies this last half century has also seen a wholesale collapse of the local grain storage and milling business. There was a time that virtually every small agricultural community had a small-scale miller where local farmers would take their seed to; be stored; turned into animal feed; turned into flour; pooled and shipped to centralized grain terminals, stored (and often mixed with that of other local producers) as seed for next year's grain crop. Local bakers would get the flour they used from the local miller. Often the miller, generally a grain farmer himself, would take as payment a set amount of the grain he was given to mill or the product he produced from that milling. Often miller and baker were one in the same. My small town had such a mill until twenty years ago. Now all of the grain produced goes into the impersonal national and global distribution system. The chance of the grain produced in an area even ending up on the tables of local residents is extremely slim. Once the distribution system begins to break down and the large, centralized milling companies begin to falter because of operating costs, lack of feed stock and lack of markets, how are small scale grain producers to have their grain processed into flour and seed? It could take a decade or more to revitalize and rebuild the local milling industry.

....Tomatoes in February. Ice-cream in July. New Zealand spring lamb and kiwi fruit in Toronto. Canadian maple syrup and bacon in Sydney Australia. Our food and our food tastes are a biproduct of a global food distribution system that is critically dependent on high-volume, long-distance shipping and energy-intensive refrigeration both in shipping and in general storage. When I was a child we had a root cellar for over-winter cold storage of root crops, nuts, grains and certain other fruit and vegetable crops. In addition we had an extensive food storage cellar that got restocked every fall with preserves and canned (meaning bottled) vegetables and fruits, dehydrated vegetable fruits, and a host of other preserved foods. Much of the food preserved we grew ourselves but that which wasn't was purchased locally and grown locally. When the global food distribution system begins to break down on the other side of peak oil, when energy-intensive refrigeration is no longer available for storing food after the harvest, when the materials such as mason jars, crocks, sterilizing equipment critical to canning food, when the supermarkets can no longer be looked upon as the primary source of the family's food, how will people manage? How will you manage? It could take a decade or longer to reaquire the skills and equipment and storage facilities necessary to ensure your family has food to eat at any time of the year.

....Over the last half century while much of the world has become increasingly dependent on groundwater from aquifers (97% of the world's liquid freshwater) for drinking water, industry, agricultural irrigation, and frivolous usage such as golf courses and casino fountains, the would's fresh surface water resources (lakes and rivers) have become increasingly contaminated with chemical toxins and aghricultural runoff. Although surface water is part of the global hydro-cycle and the water in the surface water systems turns over in a matter of days (water in aquifers is trapped there for, on average, 1400 years) the toxins in those systems build up in bottom sediments and continue to keep the water above toxic. It could take decades or even centuries for nature to remove the toxins that have built up in contaminated surface water systems. This is a matter of critical importance as we pass peak oil. Our ability to rely on deep aquifers for our fresh water (most shallow aquifers have already been sucked dry or have become contaminated in the same way and at the same rate as surface water), most of which are already heavilly over-exploited and declining by twenty feet or more per year, will disappear as the electricity and fossil fuels to run the massive pumps that are needed to draw water from these deep aquifers gets increasingly scarce and unreliable. Hand pumps - there were four of them within 200 yards of the home in which I grew up on which we relied for water in our plumbing-void house - are genrally not powerful enough to draw water from deep aquifers. Hand pumps are also a very scarce commodity in our industrialized society. This could place much of the world in the same position as one fifth of the world's people already are, having to rely on contaminated, chemically-toxic, disease-laden surface water and shallow aquifers for not just agricultural irrigation but for industrial use, basic hygienne and drinking water. The rate of incidence of death from water-borne diseases, which already claims millions every year, will most certainly increase exponentially.

....Vast tracts of homes have been constructed over this past half century in our industrial society. They are built to standards that assume there will be sufficient fossil-fuel and electrical energy to maintain heat to a level of 70F degrees or higher in winter and cool them to a comfortable 70F or lower in the heat of summer. Without this high-energy input those homes, more and more with sealed windows, do not have the insulation and thermal mass levels needed to maintain a home within livable standards. When the seriously-aging and materially-crumbling grids fail, even sporadically, and the fossil fuels are not available, sporadic, or priced beyond the reach of the average household, the vast majority of our modern homes will become increasingly problematic. To upgrade them all (hundreds of millions of them) to a thermal standard able to cope with the coming declines in fossil fuels will not only prove very expensive but will probably run up against increasing material shortages as available resources decline. And we most certainly aren't going to be able to think in terms of buldozing he suburbs and starting over again with housing suitable to a world of steadilly decreasing energy.

In what has become known as The Hirsch Report (commissioned by the U.S. congress and co-authored by Hirsch) [7] Robert Hirsch adamantly makes the point that it would take a minimum of 1-2 decades to prepare for the energy crisis presented by peak oil, if that effort were begun before peak oil arrived. That may already have become a moot point as we may already have passed that point with no such preparation having yet been done. But the energy crisis represented by peak oil, as I have tried to show here, is a small portion of the problems that peak oil will create or seriously exacerbate. Where preparation for the energy crisis may take 1-2 decades preparing for the parallel food, water and infrastructure crises could take many times that, could be 1-2 centuries rather than 1-2 decades with the same qualifier, that the effort is begun before peak oil, and with the additional qualifier that priority usage of the world's remaining fossil energy reserves be given to this effort. We spent the first half of the world's fossil fuel reserves creating the world as it is. It will take the other half to recreate the world as it will need to be to be workable without those fossil fuels.
===========================
1) Is aging infrastructure slowing the U.S.?
2) Engineers See Dangers in Aging Infrastructure
3) Oil peak theorist warns of chaos, war - Shawn McCarthy, Globe & Mail - Report on Business
4) Burning the furniture by Richard Heinberg
5) Biofuels: Recipe for Artificially-Induced Overshoot of Earth's Carrying Capacity
6) UN Highlights World Water Crisis
7) Peaking Of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management

Our Dangerous Infrastructure II

The real purpose of war - perhaps unintended benefit would be better phrasing - is to destroy aging infrastructure and produce a justification for spending the massive amounts of money required to rebuild or replace it. This is the intent behind war reparation payments, the victor paying for the reconstruction for the vanquished.

Under peacetime conditions governments and industry seem reluctant to commit the necessary funds and resources needed to properly maintain or replace aging infrastructure. In Europe and Asia the emphasis has been on maintaining old, well-built infrastructure. In America and the neo-west the emphasis has been on controlled demolition and replacement. Europe and Asia build infrastructure to last in perpetuity. In the neo-west we build with a designed life-span, usually not more than fifty years, then try to see how far beyond that lifespan we can go.

Most of the modern world as we know it, visible and invisible, has been built since the conclusion of WWII. Europe, like a phoenix, rose from the ashes of that war and integrated the massive amount of new replacement infrastructure with those bits of the old that had evaded the bombs. Japan and much of southeast Asia had to do the same. But North America - and Australia for that matter - has not had a war to purge it of its aging infrastructure in well over a century. Like Europe, new has been integrated with the old, though that old is much less old than European old.

The core of the unseen and taken-for-granted infrastructure underlying all North American cities large and small, however, is well over a century old and has long exceeded its designed lifespan. Even the shiny new suburbs with their modern infrastructure are tied to and equally dependent on the century-plus old infrastructure at the core of the cities they surround and to which their infrastructure is integrated, e.g. integrated water systems, electrical systems, telephone systems, transportation systems, and more.

Despite the fact infrastructure maintenance is consistently underfunded and maintenance is woefully inadequate - the prefered strategy is most often being to wait until it breaks down because the emergency created makes it easier to justify the extraordinary funds needed to fix or replace it - prodigious amounts are, nonetheless, spent on that maintenance. And that cost rises with each passing year, as does the gap between maintenance required and maintenance performed.

Underappreciated in all of this is that maintenance and upkeep of the massive infrastructure on which our society is built requires equally massive amounts of highly specialized technology and equipment for its maintenance. And therein lies my primary concern and the reason I keep returning to the issue of infrastructure in this blog. As we approach, arrive at and pass peak oil this issue will become increasingly important. Our undermaintained infrastructure, the vast bulk of which has been built in the sixty years since the end of World War II with a designed lifespan generally of fifty years, will be entering a period of terminal decay at the same time as the energy resources of the world, on which their maintenance depends, enter a period of terminal decline. The technology required to maintain that infrastructure will be increasingly unusable as it too decays and as replacement parts or replacement technology are increasingly unavailable. Much of this equipment is specifically designed, engineered and built as a one-off to satisfy the needs of a particular piece of infrastructure. The infrastructure which underpins our society which has always been a societal asset will increasingly become a massive and dangerous social liability.

Our communities, most particularly our cities, are seriously unnatural environments. In order for such large numbers of people, or any species, to live packed together at such close quarters in one place requires all manner of judiciously maintained infrastructure to prevent those places becoming health and environmental death traps. There are very few species that naturally live together in one place in large numbers, and even fewer in the numbers that human communities reach. Ants, bees, termites, corral and bats are a few that come to mind. Ants, bees and termites have worker classes whose job it is to keep the community - the bee hive or the ant hill or termite mound - clean and maintained. Bats live at the top of caves while their waste is dropped to the bottom of the caves where it is used by countless insects and micro-organisms. And corral rely on various species of fish and other marine organisms and the movement of ocean currents to clean away their refuse. Most animals living together in large numbers live in herds that are constantly on the move from one place to another, never staying in one place long enough for their waste to become a problem for the herd. But the safe maintenance of the living environment for community-based species is an ongoing battle for all of them and requires that their communities be frequently abandoned and new communities started. I would very much doubt that we could find an anthill or termite mound or beehive that has been a continuous site of occupation for thousands or even hundreds of years.

The greater the amount of infrastructure there is on which a community relies the greater is the reluctance to abandon it. The more you have, the more you have invested, the more there is to lose in doing so. And for we humans, the longer a community exists the greater the intangibles, such as history and the arts, that are also lost in abandoning the community. The longer we stay in one place the more reluctant we are to move on. Nowhere, it seems, is that moreso than with our cities. Our attachment and commitment to our cities, in fact, is far stronger it seems than our sense of nationalism and patriotism, both of which must be artificially reinforced. Our sense of kinship and belonging with our community seems far more natural, almost tribal by comparison.

This is going to be a serious social conundrum as we slide down the back side of Hubbert's Peak. Those cities, at least the large ones of over a half million population, are simply not going to be sustainable or supportable in a post-peak world. They exist in a virtual vacuum critically dependent on the outlying areas that surround them for their very survival. They will ultimately have to be abandoned but there will exist a passionate reluctance to do so. Serious time and critical resources will be wasted trying to make them survivable and sustainable. There will be powerful voices that remind us of the strong and long-surviving city states of the past like Athens, Rome, Chichen Itza and Machu Pichu. But there is no comparison between them and our fragile, technology-dependent cities of today. As their massive infrastructure decays and becomes increasingly dangerous, that hanging-on will become increasingly dangerous as well.

Even those great city states of the past were abandoned, some many times over the course of history. They also generally relied, it must be remembered, on a significant slave population who, like the workers in the ant colony and bee hive, were responsble for maintaining with brute force the infrastructure of those city states. To expect to take a modern day New York or London or Los Angeles or Tokyo back to the type of city state that existed in the past is folly in the extreme. It simply is not possible, even with slave labour. Our modern cities require armies of highly trained, technically proficient workers to keep them maintained. It can't be done with shovels and hammers. Just as the equipment and technology required to do the maintenance will become unusable because it can't be maintained or replaced, so too will the knowledge base for doing the maintenance begin to disappear as the institutions for training that army of maintenance specialists disappear. One way or another all of that infrastructure will ultimately simply be left to decay.

But what happens as it does? Dams burst. Bridges collapse. Glass fronted steel towers rain down showers of glass shards. Elevators plummet to the sub-basement. Tunnels flood or collapse. Sewers break and release toxins into surrounding soil. Water systems break and cause serious flooding before they eventually stop working all together. Concrete reinforced shorelines break down and weakened soil begins to wash away. Elevated highways collapse. And on and on. When our infrastructure begins to break down for the last time it will not be an "oh well" event. Each of those individual breakdowns will potentially be catastrophic events. The breach of a single dam on any of our rivers is very likely to cause cascade failures of every other weakened, under-maintained dam downstream from the original collapse. Any community in the way will be defenseless.

We do not know exactly when peak oil will be, or if it has already happened. We do not know how rapid the decline in global energy supplies will be on the other side of that peak. But we do know we have a global society based on expansion of the money supply through credit as the underpinning to an economic paradigm of perpetual growth. And we can reasonably surmise that when the global energy supplies go into decline so too will that global economy for industrial growth will stop. When it does it is very likely that the current luke-warm commitment to infrastructure maintenance will all but totally disappear as cost-cutting becomes the primary tool for attempted survival. The rate of decay of that already over-aged infrastructure will accelerate dramatically and there will no longer be the funds, the resources, the commitment, the energy nor the technology to upgrade it or replace it.

And yet our politicians continue to base our short-term and long-term plans on more growth, more new infrastructure, always more. They continue to operate as though our society as it exists can and will go on forever, or at least until they are out of office and it becomes someone else's problem. We cannot and must not allow them to keep leading us further down that path.

We cannot enter this future in such a way that that infrastructure will simply be left to decay. Any infrastructure than can not be maintained in a post-oil, post-technological age must be decommissioned before that age is thrust upon us. We don't need more dams. We need to be decommissioning those that already exist. We don't need more highways, more skyscrapers, more bridges, more of everything. We need to seriously evaluate the maintainability of every piece of infrastructure once we pass peak oil and if it is deemed unmaintainable once we enter that age it must be disposed of now, while we still have the funds, the energy, and the technology to do so.

Infrastructure and infrastructure maintenance are invisible issues to most of society. They are not at all sexy, certainly not the type of stuff that election platforms are built on. We must, however, somehow force them to become just that. We must demand of our politicians a vision and a platform that deals with the reality of peak oil and global energy decline. And that vision and platform must incorporate a strong component of how our aging infrastructure will be dealth with once they are elected. If we do not demand this of our politicians then we are condoning their taking us on a sleepwalk into a very dangerous future of terminal infrastructure decay. I don't want to see that for our children. They deserve better from us.

Our Dangerous Infrastructure

See these other articles in the blog related to infrastructure maintenance;
The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance
The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis
Lake Ontario & St. Lawrence River after Peak Oil
Post Peak Dam Maintenance, or Lack Thereof

This article concerns the post peak oil dangers represented by the decay of our modern infrastructure. Of all the implications of peak oil and the energy downslope on the other side this is the one least present in the public consciousness or, for that matter, even in the minds of most of those who are peak oil aware. I understand that. Infrastructure is not something we think about. It doesn't grab our attention. It is just there. The only time we are really conscious of it is when it fails, when the levees break in New Orleans or an overpass collapses in Montreal or a bridge falls into the Mississippi in Minneapolis or the grid dies in the entire northeast or an ice storm collapses hydro transmission towers in Quebec.

Very few of us have any connection with the infrastructure that underlies the smooth working of our society. It is invariably designed, built and maintained by an army of people with very specialized knowledge and skills that are outside the purview of the average citizen. That is part of what keeps it invisible to us. Even the infrastructure in our homes is invisible to most of us, the foundation, the framework inside the walls, the plumbing and electrical wiring running through the walls, floors and ceilings, the structure that supports the roof, the little details that let our house breathe. These are all someone else's concern, the hired plumber or electrician or handyman or builder or whoever. We pick up the phone, unconscious of the massive infrastructure that allows that system to work, and call somebody to come fix whatever it is that is broken. We don't care how they do it, just that they do.

But how much of society's resources are tied up in that dependable, invisible infrastructure? What does it cost us all every year?

Take a single piece of infrastructure, a bridge for example. It is designed and built with a planned serviceable lifespan of fifty years. The annual cost of that structure amortized over the planned lifespan is manageable. For the sake of argument, let us say the bridge cost $50-million to build. The annual cost spread over that planned fifty year lifespan is only $1-million per year. During the first half of that lifespan the annual inspection and maintenance costs are minimal. They may be, let's say, between $200,000 and $300,000 each year, averaging $250,000 annually (about one quarter of the annual amortized construction cost) over the first 25 years. From the midway point of the designed lifespan, however, inspection and maintenance costs normally begin to rise steadily. Anyone who has ever tried to keep an aging car on the road understands this. Let us assume that costs rise 4% per year. By the fiftieth year, at a steady rate of increase in maintenance cost, the annual cost will have risen to $666,000, two thirds of the amortized construction cost. If at that stage it is decided to continue to maintain the bridge rather than decommission it or replace it, the annual maintenance costs will rise over the next 25 years to $1,778,000 per year, nearly double the annual amortization cost during the designed lifespan of the bridge.

In a constantly growing economy the amount of newer infrastructure is always greater than the amount of aging infrastructure, the average age generally half or less than the overall average designed lifespan. Under such circumstances prioritizing and paying for the cost of maintenance for the relatively small amount of aging infrastructure is not a big issue, particularly where there is some form of centralized or collective budgeting (government?) for that cost to be spread over the whole infrastructure budget. The percentage of the overall infrastructure budget committed for maintenance is relatively low. In a declining economy, however, where the infrastructure is always pushed just a little bit further, expected to last just a little bit longer, where the average age of the infrastructure inventory steadily increases toward and then beyond the designed service life, not only does the ratio of maintenance cost to development cost increase but, as the overall infrastructure inventory exceeds its design lifespan the cost of proper maintenance will actually reach the point where it exceeds what would have been the amortized construction cost of new infrastructure. The decision to push the infrastructure to stay in service longer, because of the declining economy, is not made with a clear and honest understanding and admission that the maintenance costs will continue to grow. In fact, more often than not such decisions are probably made concurrent with a decision to decrease or, at best, hold the line on the maintenance budget. This should not be surprising to anyone. Even in this age of a constantly growing economy maintenance budgets are invariably underfunded and maintenance short cuts are the norm rather than the exception.

The reason that the amount of new infrastructure developed in a shrinking economy decreases is not because the infrastructure is any less needed than it was when the economy was growing. It is because the cost of new infrastructure is higher than can be justified in a shrinking economy. The cost exceeds the need. In a declining economy the overall infrastructure budget shrinks. Why, then, would one expect those budgets to suddenly and miraculously increase to meet the escalating needs of infrastructure maintenance when those maintenance costs rise above the level it would take to develop new infrastructure? The budget for infrastructure maintenance in that declining economy will have shrunk proportional to the budget for new infrastructure because "everybody knows" maintenance is always a proportion of the cost of new infrastructure. If the amount of new infrastructure is declining, obviously, so too should the amount set aside for maintenance. This is a mindset that is not likely to be easily changed just because the economy is shrinking.

The current U.S. infrastructure maintenance/renewal backlog is estimated at $1.6-trillion, Canada's between $60-125-billion. The dollar value of the infrastructure in need of that maintenance is probably inestimable at this stage, with over 600,000 bridges and 75,000 dams in the U.S. alone. They were essentially all designed and built with a planned service life of fifty years. The average age of all of that infrastructure, as a result, most of it built between 1950 and the late 1970s, has now exceeded half the serviceable lifespan with as much as one quarter of that infrastructure having already exceeded its full designed service lifespan. And the maintenance backlog continues to grow and the infrastructure inventory continues to age. Canada's maintenance backlog is estimated to be growing by $2-billion annually, the U.S. backlog between $25-50-billion, almost equal the total of the $30-billion annual infrastructure maintenance budget.

As the age of any unit of infrastructure increases and the maintenance costs begin to climb there will most often be a period of time when those rising costs are absorbed through a process of "creative accounting". This is generally done on an assumption that the higher costs are a temporary aberration. As the cost increases develop into a trend, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to "hide" and absorb the rising costs. Those increases must be dealt with, and are usually dealt with by recommending that the unit be upgraded or replaced and/or imposing limits on the maintenance that will be done in order to keep the maintenance costs within budget. It's not unlike what you do when the maintenance costs on your aging car suddenly shoot up. At first you just absorb it, figuring it is a temporary situation. As it becomes a regular event, though, you suddenly have some decisions to make. Do you continue to absorb the cost? Increase you vehicle maintenance budget? Decide to avoid certain types of maintenance that you decide is non-critical? Or decide to start looking for another car? Or do you consider leasing rather than buying? If you are confident your job will continue and your salary will continue to increase you probably decide to replace. But if your job is threatened or the company is imposing salary limitations or salary cuts or your confidence in your future earnings potential is otherwise shaken, you may be forced to consider other options.

That is the situation our society, national and global, will be facing as we pass peak oil and it begins to have a destructive impact on the national and global economy. The first victim of budget cuts is almost invariably maintenance. Investigations following most major infrastructure failures, even in a vibrant economy, highlight insufficient or ineffective maintenance as the key factor in the failure. That is followed by design flaws, either from an engineering perspective or from an insufficient understanding of the failure criteria.

Let us be clear. Neither design flaws nor shortcomings in infrastructure maintenance are a guarantee that the infrastructure will suffer a catastrophic failure. Considering the nearly 700,000 bridges and dams in operation in the U.S. the number of catastrophic failures are surprisingly low. They stick in the public consciousness because they are catastrophic, like a plane crash that kills three hundred people compared to the same number dying in two hundred different car accidents. The plane crash is global news. The two hundred car accidents are buried on the inside pages of two hundred local newspapers.

But this is the nature of air travel and of major infrastructure. When it fails it is serious business. People die, often in large numbers. When the levees failed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina thousands of people perished. The 1963 failure of the Vajont dam in Italy claimed 2,500 lives. In the catastrophic dam failure in China in 1975 over 85,000 people died. The Val di Stava dam collapse in Italy in 1985 took another 268 lives. Railway crashes, often due to infrastructure failure, regularly take hundreds of lives. Even as you read this the so-called Saddam dam that holds back the waters of the Tigris River in northern Iraq is in imminent danger of collapse and under constant surveillance. It is no longer a question of if the dam will fail, just a question of when. When it does fail, a wall of water will sweep into Mosul, Iraq's third largest city with a population of 1.7 million, 20 miles to the south. Once the dam fails evacuation will no longer be an option. That wall of water will reach Mosul in minutes.

Our major infrastructure, especially that like dams, levees and bridges that deal with water, are very dangerous when they fail. Unfortunately, without proper maintenance and timely replacement or decommissioning failure is an eventual certainty. The only uncertainty is when that failure will occur. In that regard it is important to note that all of our infrastructure, especially that designed and built since WWII, has a designed life-span. That life-span is generally planned to be fifty years. In fairness, generally infrastructure can be retained in service safely for an extra half of it's designed life-span. In general, therefore, with proper maintenance that infrastructure designed to last fifty years can be safely operated for seventy-five years. Some can and does function much longer than that. The Brooklyn Bridge, for example, was opened in 1883 and is still in service today 124 years later, despite both design and construction flaws. The bridge has, however, failed its latest safety inspection and its days may be numbered. It is important to note that the Manhattan tower of the bridge has always rested on sand, thirty feet short of the underlying bedrock. With hundreds of thousands of vehicles crossing the bridge daily and hundreds or even thousands on the bridge at any given time, the risk of any failure being catastrophic is simply too great to continue to push the limits.

If peak oil results in the economic failure that most analysts expect and if it occurs within the next ten to fifteen years, which is almost guaranteed, it could not come at a worse time when looking at the aging infrastructure around us. Over 80% of our current, major, functioning infrastructure was built in the quarter century beginning in 1950 or earlier. Over 50% of that infrastructure will have exceeded its designed service life by 2025. By the middle of this century almost all of that infrastructure currently in service will have reached or exceeded its designed lifespan. In this same timeframe, unfortunately, the national and global economy will probably be in a period of severe contraction due to the impact of global peak oil. It is unlikely in a contracting economy that infrastructure, regardless of it's age, will be replaced or, perhaps, even properly decommissioned. Efforts will be made to keep that infrastructure in service as long as possible, or longer. But peak oil will hit, the global economy will go into terminal decline at the very time when most of our infrastructure seriously needs replacement or decommissioning.

Major infrastructure is increasingly dangerous as it ages beyond its designed service life, even with proper maintenance. Every dam represents a serious danger to those living or working downstream from it. Every major aging bridge crossing any waterway is an increasing risk to those who continue to use it when it has surpassed its reasonable age of serviceability. But by the middle of this century virtually all of our major infrastructure will reach that age, and will probably do so without proper maintenance performed on it possibly for decades.

If a bridge gets too old and too unsafe to use ultimately it can simply be closed off and left to fail. Unless something happens to be under it at the time of collapse it probably won't be a catastrophe. Dams and levees, however, are another matter. They don't pass over water. They hold back water, tremendous volumes of water. If those structures failure the sudden unleashing of all that water will be catastrophic, regardless of where that structure is. Over ten percent of our dams and levees hold back water from major population centers, many from cities of millions of people, like the risk posed to Mosul by the Saddam dam. When they fail, which they will if not eventually decommissioned or replaced, the results will be unquestionably catastrophic. Unlike bridges, dams and levees represent an ongoing and increasing risk regardless of whether we are "using" them or not. They can't simply be blocked off and left to fail with no resulting loss of life or property. A bridged blocked off no longer has traffic crossing it to be at risk. A dam blocked off still holds back billions of gallons of water capable of inundating the land downstream and potentially destroying anything or anyone in its path.

If we enter the anticipated era of declining global economy with a general and, more importantly, leadership mindset that still believes the invisible hand of the markets will right all problems, our infrastructure woes and the risks involved will continue to worsen. That belief in the ability of the markets to correct themselves is based on an assumption that the state of normalcy to which the markets will eventually return is one of growth. That assumption is, however, based on endless consumption of resources supported by an endless and reliable supply of energy. Once we pass peak oil neither will possible. The state of decline, for all practical purposes, will be permanent.

The first victim in any budget cuts is almost always the maintenance budget. The first priority for business, and probably government as well, in a declining economy will be to do whatever is necessary to keep profits up while sales are declining, again based on an assumption that overtime sales will return to a pattern of growth. This invariably means cutting costs. Profits invariably mean growth, the willingness of a society to pay more for goods than their real value (the profits) in a belief that that value will increase with time. In an environment of perpetual economic decline this will not be possible. The longer any business or nation tries to hold on in a belief that things will get back to normal the more assured is their eventual collapse.

The cutting of maintenance budgets in a downturn is, like all other cost-cutting measures, assumed to be a necessary and temporary adjustment. It is assumed that when things turn around that deferred maintenance will be caught up. But when there is no turn around, no correction, no return to normal growth on the horizon, the maintenance deficit and the risks implicit in that deficit continue to worsen. When the infrastructure with which those risks are being taken, for which maintenance is being "temporarily" deferred, is already near, at or beyond its designed service life those decisions put society in general at serious risk. This is critically so with dams, levees, bridges and other water management infrastructure.

Facing the reality of peak oil and the implications for our economy and society is no longer an option, no longer something that can be denied or avoided. There is far too much risk to society in a do-nothing, laissez-faire approach. Doing nothing simply increases the risk and threat. We need to face that reality, face the implications, make the decisions and begin the corrective action necessary before peak oil is upon us and before the global economy slides into a state of perpetual decline. The resources, particularly financial, will simply not be available to take the appropriate action if we wait for that event to push us into action.

I am not optimistic that we will do what needs to be done. All of the historical evidence suggests that we will not. One can only hope and add one's voice to the demands for appropriate and timely action.

Post Peak Dam Maintenance, or Lack Thereof

"Dam failures are of particular concern because the failure of a large dam has the potential to cause more death and destruction than the failure of any other man-made structure. This is because of the destructive power of the flood wave that would be released by the sudden collapse of a large dam."[2] What will be the fate of the world's large dams after peak oil as energy declines, technology falters and budgets for inspection and maintenance of these critical and dangerous facilities begin to be pared back in deference to perceived more immediate societal priorities?

(See also; The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance, The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis, and Lake Ontario & St. Lawrence River after Peak Oil in my blog.)



Most major cities, both globally and here in Canada, were born, developed and have evolved on the low-lying land adjacent to major bodies of water, either saltwater oceans, seas, bays and inlets or freshwater lakes and rivers. The cities sitting on saltwater shores seem to have been built with the dangerously misguided assumption that sea level is and will continue to be constant. The cities on freshwater shores are largely protected by a cornucopia of technology and infrastructure that has essentially stabilized water levels in the bodies of water on which they are situated.

In recent years, with the growth of scientific research and knowledge of global warming, there has been considerable attention paid to the risk faced by major cities over this next century from the potential sea-level rise that could result from the meltdown of glaciers and, most importantly, polar ice caps (79% of the world's fresh water is locked up in ice and snow). Very little attention has been paid, however, to the risk faced by major cities situated on freshwater shores that could result from the potential post peak-oil disintegration and collapse of the technology and infrastructure containing and controlling billions of tons of water upstream from these major cities. There are numerous internet sites that show the inundation risk of coastal areas from sea level rise. Very little has been done on inundation mapping downstream from major dams. That is not to suggest that smaller communities are not subject to the same risks, as most communities have evolved in the same way, on low-lying land adjacent to lakes, rivers and seas.

There are about 80,000 dams in the U.S., for example, the majority even today over fifty years old. According to FEMA, "Approximately one third of these pose a "high" or "significant" hazard to life and property if failure occurs."[1] It is important to note, here, that "high" and "significant" are from a national perspective in terms of potential dollar damage and potential deaths. As the report Flood Disasters in Canada[6] suggests, risk analysis statistics are "biased towards the more densely populated areas ..... where floods are more likely to impact humans." A dam failure upstream of any populated area would, however, be considered "significant" for those living downstream. According to the National Performance of Dams Program (NPDP), "at least 85% of the more than 75,000 dams in the the US will be in excess of 50 years old by 2020." The report goes on to stress, "Perhaps more significantly, most of the large dams throughout the US are also approaching old age."[5] There is, of course, a reason for this impending flush of aging dams. According to the report Dam Construction[7], "Within the U.S., the most active period of dam building occurred between 1950 and 1970, and has been called “the golden age of dam building” (Doyle et al., 2003). The same comment is frequently made about the situation in Canada." In Ontario today, "In the case of Ontario Power Generation’s almost 200 dams, nearly two thirds are in excess of 50 years old."[5]

Generally there is now a trend in Canada to move away from the large hydro megaprojects. "Because of the size, cost and negative environmental impacts of large dam projects, hydro development has been increasingly focused on small-scale projects, i.e., those with less than 10 MW of generating capacity. Many of these are run-of-the-river projects. There are currently more than 300 plants in Canada with a capacity of 15 MW or less (Industry Canada, 2003) and numerous others under consideration, particularly for remote communities that rely on high-cost diesel generation. Approximately 5500 sites in Canada are technically feasible for small-scale hydroelectric production (Natural Resources Canada, 2000)."[7] Though this means a reducing risk of failure of large dams, it increases the number of dams being built in proximity to and designed to service population centers, many remote where emergency response to a disaster would be delayed because of that remoteness.

Fifty years used to be considered the average life expectancy for dams. Not to suggest that the statistics or studies are being slanted but, with the rapidly ageing inventory of North American dams, a report entitled Dam Construction suggests, "Based on extensive U.S. experience, the life span of typically unmaintained dams is conservatively estimated at 75 years, refuting the common misconception that the average life of a dam is 50 years (Donnelly et al., 2002)."[7] Gee, ain't that lucky. I guess that takes the pressure off. The public relations importance of this statement is twofold, first the supposed refutation of the 50 year lifespan but, also, the inclusion of the phrase "typically unmaintained dams". Numerous studies by the International Joint Commission (IJC), FEMA, the National Performance of Dams Program (NPDP), and others, have suggested that even where dam safety programs exist and inspections occur, the vast majority of North American dams are not being maintained effectively today, many not even regularly inspected. The IJC, for example, considers the three dams involved in the international Moses/Saunders hydro dam facility at Cornwall Ontario and Messina New York (these dams hold back the waters of Lake Ontario from the St. Lawrence: the Great Lakes containing 22,573km3 of water, 22.573billion m3, enough water to cover 18.3 million acres of downstream land to a depth of 1 foot), to be potentially unsafe due to lack of inspections and maintenance. Even if the average life expectancy of a dam is 75 years rather than fifty as the above report suggests, that still means that the huge glut of dams built between 1950 and 1970 will all pass that average life expectancy by the middle of this century, at a time when the energy, technology and economy for their increasingly necessary maintenance or their decommissioning will be in serious decline. With the average life expectancy of a dam, whether that be fifty years or seventy-five, the cost and complexity of decommissioning is most often as high as it was for the original construction. There is a significant risk beyond peak oil that dams may simply be de-operated (stopping the usage and maintenance) rather than decommissioned (properly torn down and replaced or returning the river to its natural flow). The track record of site decommissioning, whether dams, nuclear sites, toxic chemical sites, or others, has not been good. There is no reason to expect that it will improve under the difficult circumstances we will face on the other side of peak oil.

Whether or not the focus on "typically unmaintained dams" in the above report is based on a knowledge of peak oil and its implications, it does suggest an awareness of widespread concerns about the future maintenance and maintainability of dams and related infrastructure. A report entitled Risky Business for Dams[5] makes the following statement, "Dam owners are facing increasingly difficult decisions about the ways in which finite financial and human resources should be allocated to ensure the continuing safe operation of ageing dams. Without such investment, dam failure is not only a possibility but can be an expected consequence of lack of proper maintenance and diligence by a dam owner." Washington State alone lists more than a dozen dam failures in the last two decades, despite the level of current technologies, full energy availability and a vibrant economy.[4]

Canada is a large, cold nation. We have significant energy needs for transportation, for infrastructure and industry, and for home heating, cooling and cooking. As the global and national reserves of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) diminish over the course of this century Canada's needs for energy will still remain high. More and more people will, as fossil fuels decline, revert, out of necessity, to the use of wood for heating their homes and cooking their food. Canada is still blessed with an abundance of temperate forests. These forests, however, are generally not in the same locations as the population concentration. The amount of forest cover in populated areas has already diminished to minuscule levels. The pressures put on that remaining accessible forest cover in the search of fuel for home heating and cooking will become increasingly severe over the balance of this century.

This large-scale reversion to the use of wood for heating and cooking will have a major and increasing impact on the viability of the nation's dams. As forest cover is removed from the hills and fields of a river's watershed (especially in the case of clear-cutting), and with the increasing pressure on those lands for food and feed crop production, the amount of soil and plant material carried by that river will increase, particularly after major weather events. There have been countless examples - globally moreso than locally - of the devastating impact of flooding when a watercourse in flash flood fills with silt and debris from upstream. Often whole communities are buried in mud or wiped out by being carried away by torrents of water. With the anticipated increase in the removal of forest cover for fuel, with the loss of it's impact on the ability of the soil to absorb and retain moisture, and with the anticipated increase in severe weather events due to global warming, the volume of silt and debris in future flood events expose Canadian rivers to the type of catastrophic flooding we have seen elsewhere in the world. The risk of dam overtopping on managed watercourses (which includes most rivers flowing through populated areas) increases dramatically under such circumstances as the volume of flood flow includes as much or more silt and debris as water. That increase in silt carried down from upstream will also dramatically increase the silting up of the reservoir behind the dam. This means the reservoir will have less water for power generation or downstream usage. It also increases the risk of overtopping during extreme weather events as dams will more commonly be run at their maximum reservoir level leaving less margin in the silt-shallowed reservoir for absorbing the sudden run-off.

There is little reason to believe that once we have passed peak oil and the global economy implodes that future maintenance and commitment to safe decommissioning will increase as the tens of thousands of North American dams age. Historically, societies have simply abandoned infrastructure as the society disintegrates. A society in decline simply no longer has the resources to live up to those well-intentioned commitments made when that society was at its peak. The dam-building golden age of the 1950s to 1970s was an age without the foresight of peak oil and its implications for technology and the global economy. That glut of dam building happened without an awareness of the probability that all of those dams would reach old age at a time when society will have gone into terminal decline. It's like a commitment made to maintain a nuclear waste dump in perpetuity as long as the radiation levels in the stored material remain dangerous. It is easy to make such commitments when you see things continuing as they are indefinitely into the future. "All things being equal....." will simply not apply on the other side of peak oil. The rules will have changed. The people who made those commitments in the past will no longer be around to shoulder the responsibility to deliver on those commitments. That will fall to people struggling with simply trying to figure out how to survive the collapse.



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The following were key documents in the research for this article;
1) FEMA: Dam Failure
2) Dam Failures
3) Notable Dam Failures: Recent Dam Failures and Lessons Learned
4) Reasons for Dam Failures
5) Risky business for dams
6) Flood Disasters in Canada
7) Dam Construction
8) Hydroelectric power generation

The Myth of Permanence: Post-Peak Infrastructure Maintenance

As we pass peak oil and then peak energy what will happen to the massive infrastructure and engineering marvels of our global society when we no longer have the energy, resources and technology to maintain them? All we need do is look to the past for answers. What happened to the infrastructure of past civilizations; Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, the Mayan, Incan, Aztec empires? Nature reclaimed them, and was not particularly kind in the process. The wonders of Egypt had to be dug out of an ever-expanding desert. The massive temples and creations of the past empires of the Americas had to be resurrected from the overgrowth of encroaching jungle. The remains of the Roman Empire and ancient Greece had to be exumed from beneath the natural landscape of Europe.

Nature does not lovingly or dutifully maintain our creations for us. She doesn't give a damn how much effort we put into them, how important they were to us. Nature is dynamic, constantly changing. Permanence is a human myth totally at odds with nature's reality.

Infrastructure is the hard wiring of our society. Much of it is invisible. To those living within the embrace of that infrastructure it is taken for granted, is seen as permanent, the foundation of that society and of their individual lives. But it seems so because there is an army of people and a kalaidescope of technology that is constantly working to keep it maintained. While past empires were alive and vibrant similar efforts and energies and armies of people, many of them slaves, were maintaining their infrastructure, maintaining the impression of permanence by keeping it clean and safe and polished and in working order. When those empires fell and all of that constant maintenance ceased that impression and myth of permanence fell apart and the inevitable reality of deterioration set in.

There was a major difference in those past empires, a serious contrast to our current global society. They were built to last, designed for permanence, strong, durable, bold. They were built of stone. And that intent of durability and the materials they used are the only reason there was anything left of those empires for our modern day archeologists to dig up, uncover, retrieve, resurrect. But even this was but an abstract impression of what that civilization was. What was left to recover was bits and pieces of the puzzle that had enormous holes from the missing pieces. They were haunting images of what was that gave little clues as to how those past great civilizations functioned on a day to day basis.

With these clues from history should we expect anything different of our own dangerously impermanent infrastructure when our desire, commitment and ability to maintain it begin to falter? Even without catastrophes like New Orleans, Banda Ache, floods, hurricanes, landslides, earthquakes, et al, that infrastructure will continue to deteriorate long after the maintenance has ceased. Much of that infrastructure will be increasingly dangerous as it deteriorates.

Think about the impact of deterioration on the components of our infrastructure;
bridges, overpasses, underpasses, tunnels, elevated highways, canals, water diversions, levees, dykes, dams, aquaducts, reservoirs, sewer systems, water systems, cable systems, underground power lines, airports, supertankers, weapons silos, reservoirs, nuclear power plants, zoos, river channels, steel and glass skyscrapers, apartment towers, prisoners, passenger jets, munitions depots, the chunnel, flood control systems, arenas, stadiums, coliseums,race tracks, elevator, underground service corridors, subways, elevated transit systems, race tracks, amusement parks, communication towers, space junk, theaters and concert halls, wharves, marinas, parking lots, rail yards, dry docks, storm barriers, irrigation channels, transmission lines, highway service centers, warehouses, agricultural terraces, walls and barriers, grain silos, multi-level car parks, pressurized storage tanks, toxic waste depots, settling ponds, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

It is not just an issue of deterioration. It is an issue of increasing threats to safety and security as that infrastructure deteriorates. One of the sad lessons of the past century is that one of the first cost-saving measures that is turned to when things get tough is infrastructure maintenance. Maintenance does not make money. Too often it is done at all only because there is legislation and laws that demand it.

Look around you. Look at your community. Make a mental note of all of the infrastructure on which your community depends for its smooth functioning. Think about the maintenance that keeps that infrastructure functioning. Think about where the funds for that maintenance comes from. Think about what will happen to that source of funds when we pass peak oil or the economy falls apart or any of the other serious scenarios that may befall us in the near term future. Ask yourself if you are comfortable with that.