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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Maintain or Perish

This is Steven Petrick Posting:

Redundancy surrounds us all our lives, often unseen. It is multiple redundancies that enable most of use to get through our day to day lives worried about relatively minor personal things rather than "the larger picture".

Thing is that increasingly our elected leaders have been using the redundancy of the system to "make points".

A lot of our recent problems with power shortfalls have to do with political decisions to make creating additional power stations difficult. None of these decisions halted the growing demand for power. The result was the redundant back ups in the system increasingly had to be put on line simply to handle what was regarded as "the normal load". Keeping the systems constantly on-line increasingly moved maintenance from a norm to an "emergency response" level. Which meant repairs increasingly are done only as much as needed to immediately get the system back up, not really fix the problem.

This not something just affecting power systems.

The infrastructure maintenance budget at all levels has been tapped to meet other needs, with necessary maintenance being deferred. The result is when maintenance can be done, it is often more expensive than it had been done continuously, resulting in greater shortfall of the maintenance budget.

So our infrastructure is gradually crumbling around us.

The power grid and our infrastructure need to be a major effort, but you will notice that even with the recent bridge collapse, the problems with our infrastructure are not being addressed in the campaign for the highest office in the land.

So the problem continues to grow, and the failure to maintain properly now will lead to greater costs, both monetary and in lives, down the road.