This week in Congress… no infrastructure!

5th Ave., a muddy street!

IN THE NEWS:

Even by our recent standards, this was an eventful (read dysfunctional) week in the U.S. Congress. Democrats’ signature domestic agenda — the desperately needed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill — was held hostage by… Democrats! Congress averted a government shutdown, but only for two months. And there is still the debt ceiling, and the specter of our nation defaulting on its debt — which would be an unprecedented failure.

The politicking around the infrastructure bill is transpiring so swiftly that we found it too early to peel the political news. But that hasn’t stopped us from peeling the history behind infrastructure news. For example, what was infrastructure like in the early days of our nation? What were the motivations for building and maintaining infrastructure? What are the engineering considerations for infrastructure? What does it mean when infrastructure “fails”? And is there any upside to that failure?

To get some answers to these questions and to better understand infrastructure all around… I spoke with Mr. Henry Petroski. At Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, Professor Petroski was responsible for R&D efforts in fracture mechanics. And from 2004 through 2012 he held a Presidential appointment as a member of the…