The Spillway That Could Only Handle Half the Flood

On January 19, 2026, a 72-inch concrete sewer main collapsed along the Clara Barton Parkway in Montgomery County, Maryland. The pipe — part of a system called the Potomac Intercept…

The number that should worry bridge engineers isn't 6.7%. That's the share of U.S. bridges currently rated poor — roughly 41,685 structures as of June 2025, down from 57,049 in 201…

The grid's most vulnerable component doesn't trip a breaker or throw a fault code when it starts to fail. A substation transformer overheats slowly, insulation degrading degree by…

Newark Liberty is running at 57 percent of its controller staffing target. Not 57 percent of some aspirational stretch goal — 57 percent of the number the FAA itself says it needs…

Corpus Christi's reservoirs are sitting at roughly 8% of combined capacity as of May 2026. The city's 318,000 residents have been under outdoor watering restrictions since August 2…

Rhode Island's Washington Bridge didn't fail because inspectors missed something obvious. It failed — or rather, forced a crisis — because the deficiencies were inside the structur…

Most dam safety conversations start with the wrong number. They count structures — over 90,000 documented constructed dams in the United States — and treat that inventory as the ri…

The substation transformer sitting at the heart of your local grid may be older than your car, older than your house, possibly older than you. That's not unusual — large power tran…

A city can rezone land, approve developments, and issue building permits faster than almost any other infrastructure decision. What it cannot do is make a water treatment plant bui…

Chicago closed five river bridges simultaneously last year to catch up on deferred repairs. That's not a maintenance strategy — that's a system that ran out of runway. The State St…

The hiring window opened at midnight on April 17. Within 12 hours, 6,000 applications had arrived. That sounds like a success story. It isn't — or at least, not yet. Because the pi…

On April 28, the Iberian Peninsula went dark. Not a localized outage, not a rolling brownout — a cascading voltage collapse that swept across Spain and Portugal in minutes. Europea…

The Bellaire dam is 120 years old. When spring snowmelt and rainfall combined to push the Intermediate River to near-record levels this month, Antrim County's deputy administrator…

Three weeks ago I wrote about what a "D" grade actually means in the ASCE infrastructure report card system — that a D is a maintenance signal, not a collapse warning. This week, t…

Two weeks ago I wrote about what ASCE's grading scale actually measures. This week, let's get more specific — because the most misread number in American infrastructure isn't a cos…

The math in Corpus Christi is brutally simple. The city's reservoirs are draining. Industrial demand — Exxon's plastics plant, jet fuel supply chains running through one of the nat…

Last Friday morning, an "imminent dam failure" notice went out for Wahiawā Dam on Oʻahu. Downstream towns were already flooding. Residents were posting on social media that evacuat…

The Bedford-Fairhaven Bridge connecting New Bedford and Fairhaven, Massachusetts closed this month, stranding commuters and rerouting commercial traffic across a region that had be…

A city of 320,000 people. One of the nation's largest petroleum ports. And, according to Inside Climate News, officials who expect to fully run out of water next year. That's not a…