I'm thinking about getting an airboat. You know, one of those boats you see on nature channels that skim the water of the Everglades with ease.

It's not for hobby. It's because I think it might be the optimal mode of transportation soon.

You see, I was running an errand a few nights ago, and happened across some flashing lights. At first, I thought I might get to slow down and help a traffic jam occur just for the sake of rubberneckin'.

Unfortunately, the red and white flashing lights I expected to see were yellow lights from city maintenance vehicles. Where police officers and emergency responders were supposed to be, there were high-visibility vests and workers with hard hats. At the key focus of the scene – where the wreck or accident was meant to be – there was enough spraying water coming out of the ground to make a fairly nice aquatics attraction at an amusement park.

Disappointed that I wasn't going to gawk at a true accident or a live episode of Cops, my eyes fixed on water escaping from between two slabs of concrete. In the dark of night, it looked very similar to Jed Clampett's bubbling crude. However, instead of extracting dollars out of the ground – I could almost see dollar signs escaping and running down the road.

That's where my airboat comes in. Many cities enjoy spending hand over fist for the best roads, but forget about the pipes running underneath the roads. Theoretically, those very fine roads would make for great river beds as water mains continue to break at alarming rates and pour their contents onto streets. As the water fills the road from curb to curb, it will make a great waterway to help my airboat get along just fine.

I get email alerts every time a news story pops up about a major water main break covered by a local newspaper or television station. Last month, I got nearly 100 alerts from across the country.

While yes, this is very tongue-in-cheek of me, finally having a water main break occur just a block or two from my home opened my eyes and got me a bit fired up. It was one of those things that are out-of-sight, out-of-mind – until it happens to you.

In this moment that I was affected by a literal gap in my local infrastructure, I started contemplating the real numbers behind the nation's financial infrastructure gap. My first course of action was to see just how much money out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (a.k.a. the Stimulus Bill) was spent on roads and how much was spent on water infrastructure in my home state.

For the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF), my home state of Oklahoma received $31,481,000 out of a $2 billion national appropriation from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The drinking water program aims to upgrade drinking water infrastructure. The national appropriation for highway infrastructure investment is reported to be $27.5 billion. Oklahoma's top funded recipient or stimulus dollars from January 1, 2010 to March 31st, 2010 was our Department of Transportation at $462,959,502. That's just about 14 times more money spent on roads than water both nationally and locally.

If you want to see what your state has spent, all the details are available at www.recovery.org.

The reason I use transportation spending as an analogy is because I can't drink asphalt or gravel. It's not necessary to every day existence, like water. At one point, this country didn't have roads, but it's always had water available to inhabitants. I would take shabbier roads (I wouldn't like it necessarily) and a more trustworthy water infrastructure. Perhaps one day soon, the funding to protect needs/water instead of wants/nice roads will be appropriate and I won't need that airboat.

On the plus side, there are proactive municipalities that are finding a way to get cost-effective, leak-free infrastructure systems in place. We've previously reported on St. Petersburg, Florida, which is implementing an 18-year $100 million replacement program; Dalton, Georgia, where they've put in 4 million feet of HDPE for water infrastructure; and coming next month, we'll visit Palo Alto, California, where the city spends $3 million annually to put in new HDPE water pipes.


Sincerely,

Tyler Henning

P.S. – Do you have an interesting job site that you would like to share? McElroy is always looking for fusion job sites where HDPE is being used and fused to solve an infrastructure problem. Contact Tyler Henning, public relations specialist at (918) 831-9286 or by email at thenning@mcelroy.com