I appreciated your column on maintenance (“Pay Me Now, or …” MSW, October 2008). It is high time all the infrastructure press paid attention to the Achilles heel of our wonderful country.

It has become a standard political ploy to pretend that everything is fine when maintenance budgets are always the first line item to get deferred or buried. Then, when the inevitable catastrophe occurs, eyes are widened in surprise: “Wow! How could this have happened?”

Our company builds parametric digital models that look at all aspects of an infrastructure project to include not only its design and construction feasibility but also a forward look to determine how the project will meet its goals in the real world. This includes modeling of maintenance and its impact.

At a recent presentation, I pointed out if you establish a project’s goals and ideal structure as being 10 on a 10-point scale, for every single point eliminated at conception you need to increase the maintenance allowance by a factor of 10 for each subsequent year of use. If you don’t, the maintenance requirement increases exponentially.

I should not have been stunned when the senior management reaction was, “How can we eliminate the entire maintenance equation from the model?” The truth was far too awkward to handle.

One of the strongest weapons that ignore-maintenance bureaucrats use is the pretense that the real world only exists in a text document format. The real world is what it is, and no amount of obfuscation or paper pushing will change that. If a project has an unrealistic budget and nonexistent maintenance allocation, or if the properly planned costs and work tasks are cut, in the real world, it will fail, often catastrophically.

The real world has a vicious payback for our budget-led political types, in that it works in the fourth dimension, with time being a cruel taskmaster. This has become so scary that outright computer fraud is being used to hide this problem.

At a university system we were working with, I was curious to see financial managers boasting about superior operational costs when I knew for a fact that they had major problems. On delving into their data I noted very large figures being moved to a “deferred” column by the bean counters with no input from the maintenance personnel.

Then every three years the entire deferred column was deleted from the spreadsheet, and maintenance was asked to recreate it from scratch. When I asked the director of finance about this, he stated bluntly that if an item had been deferred and not used for 36 months and no catastrophe had happened, then it was obviously not needed in the first place. And anyway, if a breakdown of that magnitude occurred, even with loss of life, it would probably be covered under insurance.

In the area where I live, we have major issues with aging infrastructure, especially in water and sewage. The cost to remediate these issues would be in the billions, so a major defensive tactic adopted by city, county and state administration is to include legal liability quotas into the maintenance equation.

Simply, if repair and maintenance of a part of the system would cost $200 million, the first thing that happens is that a back-of-the-notepad estimate is made of damage to the user. Say a poorly designed and operated sewage system backs up, and damages come close or exceed the repair costs. Then an automatic liability ceiling per instance is installed by legislation, or, more likely, by regulation (less public visibility).

In our community, that limit is legislated at $100,000. Note that the limit is not per home, it is per failure event. So even if 100 homeowners incur damages as a result of a sewer backup, tough. They get to share the $100,000 and have to go fight their own insurance companies for the difference between $1,000 and the actual cost of repairs.

In fact, a recent sewer backup flooded a street lined with art galleries, damaging millions of dollars of art inventory, and the 20 or so gallery owners get to share $100,000. And so our trusty civil servants have merely passed the buck back to the citizens who, in the first place, paid for the system and the people who are supposed to take care of it. Heck, why maintain anything when the adverse results are zip?

Maintenance, and I mean real maintenance, needs to become the primary focus of the operation of our entire infrastructure system. If it doesn’t, we can look to a brilliant Third World future liberally laced with repeats of the I-35 bridge failure in Minnesota.

You simply cannot manage what you do not measure, and you cannot measure what you do not see. And nearly all of our water and sewage systems live in the unseen world of paper obfuscation. It’s time they came out into the open, metaphorically speaking, where they can be maintained properly.

Peter Baston

IDEAS

Santa Fe, N.M.