I wonder what it will take to get this country serious about repairing and rebuilding its crumbling and increasingly obsolete infrastructure.

The catastrophe in New Orleans didn’t do it. Yes, that was an infrastructure tragedy. As the historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in his remarkable book, “The Great Deluge”:

“What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”

From The New York Times