Let It Crumble: When No Infrastructure Is Best

Jan. 17, 2008 -- In the rush to shore up or rebuild aging highway bridges, dams and other crumbling U.S. infrastructure, one question has been overlooked: Which infrastructures are we better off without?

A team of engineers and ecologists contend the United States is at a critical point in its history, when the smartest strategy for dealing with certain old, nearly useless dams, levees, roads, bridges, offshore oil platforms and other structures is to remove them.

"Rehabilitation might not be rehabilitation, but removal," said Martin Doyle, an environmental geographer and river specialist at the University of North Carolina. Doyle is the lead author of a paper on the challenges and opportunities posed by today's infrastructure crisis published in the Jan. 18 issue of Science. "I'm not talking about blowing up Hoover Dam," he added.

Aging, defunct dams can create problems for wildlife, so getting rid of them could be an opportunity to restore ecological health. It's an idea Doyle hopes will reach engineers and ecologists who can work together to do it right.

"The goal is to make engineers out there aware that there are ecologists out there and ecologists aware that there are engineers dealing with these problems," Doyle told Discovery News.

The call for new levels of cooperation comes just as the federal government adopts the National Infrastructure Improvement Act (NIIA), which creates the National Commission on the Infrastructure. The new law was inspired by the Interstate 35 bridge disaster in Minnesota as well as the levee failures in New Orleans.

Those Were the Days

"Fifty years ago, people didn't recognize that when you build things -- highways, bridges dams -- you were creating ecological problems," said Gerald Galloway, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Maryland and retired Brigadier General in the Army Corps of Engineers.

"When the infrastructure of this nature was put together, it was for single objectives, without consideration of other effects."