Yves here. The article below describes how critical services in the US, such as elevators and public water systems, are often so far behind in required maintenance that, for instance, a rising number of elevators are being left “out of order”. Yet even though the piece below lists the loss of seasoned workers as the first explanatory factor, it oddly fails to mentions Covid as a significant driver. But a late 2023 piece on the same topic did. From Robert Hennelly at Salon:
It’s [New York City’s] recovering from a once-in-a-century mass death event that, at one point, was killing over 700 people a day early in the more than two-year COVID pandemic that also disabled tens of thousands more….
Such an unprecedented tribulation, including shutting down much of the economy for an extended time period, has impacted everything from truancy to building code compliance and enforcement. Hundreds of career New York City civil servants died due to their occupational exposure to the deadly virus that they brought home to their families. Thousands of career civil servants from a myriad of essential titles like first responders, civil engineers, social workers, mechanics, and teachers have opted to retire or move on.
There isn’t a realm of city services not affected — from social service agencies to the city’s Department of Design and Construction. The latter is shy several dozen engineers and architects. The Department of Buildings has 73 building inspectors open positions from its existing 550-member workforce.
Now admittedly, New York City did suffer a higher rate of Covid deaths than other places. And Hennelly does not mention the loss of city workers and contractors not due generally to quitting their job, but specifically due to Covid-related disabilities or family impacts. And it’s not just Long Covid. For instance, a close relative of a moderator, a young adult, was just diagnosed with an incurable cancer. The family is having to juggle duties to handle her care. IM Doc said that he has seen a “a veritable explosion of this type of cancer since COVID and/or vaccines.” He has also repeatedly on the marked rise in the number of other unusual cancers (with specifics) as well as the so-called “turbo cancer”.
Per an article Lambert included in Links yesterday, on how the “quad-demic” has swamped UK hospitals. We never had this sort of multi-infectious-disease siege before. It’s certainly correlated with the world after Covid. And there are theories that is it causal, such as Anthony Leonardi, who posits that Covid taxes T-cells, a second line of defense for contagions, leading to reduced immune system function and thus higher vulnerability to pathogens. Note T-cells also keep cancers at bay. And adults cannot replenish them.
So are the UK and other advanced economies seeing a rise in infrastructure maintenance backlogs, due to a decline in the population of skilled laborers needed to service them?
By Kurt Cobb, a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has also appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Le Monde Diplomatique, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. Originally published at OilPrice
- The escalating cost of maintaining aging infrastructure is causing widespread problems, as exemplified by America’s elevator crisis.
- Deferred maintenance and underinvestment in infrastructure can lead to cascading failures, impacting essential services like water, electricity, and transportation.
- The failure to adequately maintain infrastructure is a recurring pattern in human civilization, with potentially devastating consequences for modern cities.
I recently noticed that the elevator at my favorite cinema has been out of order for weeks now. The less mobile patrons need that elevator to transport them downward to this underground theater. I then learned of America’s “elevator crisis”and my mind wandered to the struggle to maintain the Roman Empire. I’ll explain the connection below. But first a refresher on Rome’s predicament:
The Roman emperor Trajan brought the Roman Empire to its greatest extent during his reign (98 to 117 A.D.) with his successful conquests in what we today would call the Middle East. Rome’s many conquests had been financed by booty taken from the conquered.
But its hold on the sprawling empire—one that reached from northern England to southern Egypt, from Spain in the west to what today is called Iraq in the east—would henceforth have to be financed by rising taxes and inflated currency. The money was needed to pay for armies and naval forces to defend the empire’s very long land and maritime borders. Building an empire turned out to be less expensive than maintaining one, including building and maintaining the infrastructure of roads and military and political outposts needed to protect and administer it.
What happened to Rome’s maintenance bill happens in any system of infrastructure as it expands. The existing infrastructure must be maintained even as new infrastructure is built. Eventually, it becomes very expensive 1) to pay collectively for maintenance of all existing infrastructure and 2) to pay for increasingly aging infrastructure that requires extra expense.
America’s elevators are in category number two. Elevators are a ubiquitous and absolutely necessary piece of infrastructure in a culture that depends on high-rise buildings for much of its living and commercial space. Unfortunately for those who rely on them, the workforce that knows how to fix elevators is aging. In addition, the right parts can be hard to come by for two reasons: 1) The companies that make elevator parts prioritize the biggest customers who are concentrated in places such as China where many new tall buildings are going up and 2) some elevators are so old that no ones makes mass produced parts for them and parts have to be custom-fabricated.
Out-of-order signs on elevators are particularly hard on those with disabilities and the elderly. And, nonworking elevators are thought to be a major cause of 1.1 million yearly accidents on stairs that lead to emergency room visits. Even for the young and vigorous, elevator failures, if frequent enough, could make buildings over a certain height uninhabitable. The long stairway down to my basement cinema almost certainly prevents many patrons from even thinking about attending showings there for now.
But elevators are just one part of the sprawling infrastructure that is the modern globalized world. Water systems in the United States are in serious trouble for the same reason, aging infrastructure. Building owners have incentives to maintain elevators to keep their building habitable. Most water systems are owned by municipalities and those municipalities must look to ratepayers to pay their bills. As the bills for system maintenance have skyrocketed, so have rates. But that may not be enough since in many towns, especially smaller ones, shrinking populations have made it difficult to raise enough money for repairs even with higher rates.
Many large infrastructure systems are now facing a reckoning for deferred maintenance or failure to plan for growing demands. The American electrical infrastructure suffers from both problems. The term of art is “modernizing.” But that just means making up for all the deferred maintenance AND expanding the size and capability of the system at the same time.
Next time you see an out-of-order sign on an elevator you’ll know a little of what’s behind it. And, it’s the same problem facing most of the world’s legacy infrastructure that will lead to more frequent boil-water notices from water utilities and power outages by electric utilities.
It is the pattern of human civilization to happily invest in infrastructure during a growth phase and then try to avoid the expense of maintaining that infrastructure when growth is over. That is a recipe for ruin as deferred maintenance makes it all the more likely that both private and public owners of infrastructure will be hit with huge and perhaps unpayable bills in the future. That pattern also risks making some part or even entire major systems unusable. It’s hard to imagine how any modern city could withstand prolonged outages of water, electricity or even of its elevators.