Yves here. The article below describes how critical services in the US, such as elevators and public water systems, are often so far behind in required maintenance that, for instance, a rising number of elevators are being left “out of order”. Yet even though the piece below lists the loss of seasoned workers as the first explanatory factor, it oddly fails to mentions Covid as a significant driver. But a late 2023 piece on the same topic did. From Robert Hennelly at Salon:
It’s [New York City’s] recovering from a once-in-a-century mass death event that, at one point, was killing over 700 people a day early in the more than two-year COVID pandemic that also disabled tens of thousands more….
Such an unprecedented tribulation, including shutting down much of the economy for an extended time period, has impacted everything from truancy to building code compliance and enforcement. Hundreds of career New York City civil servants died due to their occupational exposure to the deadly virus that they brought home to their families. Thousands of career civil servants from a myriad of essential titles like first responders, civil engineers, social workers, mechanics, and teachers have opted to retire or move on.
There isn’t a realm of city services not affected — from social service agencies to the city’s Department of Design and Construction. The latter is shy several dozen engineers and architects. The Department of Buildings has 73 building inspectors open positions from its existing 550-member workforce.
Now admittedly, New York City did suffer a higher rate of Covid deaths than other places. And Hennelly does not mention the loss of city workers and contractors not due generally to quitting their job, but specifically due to Covid-related disabilities or family impacts. And it’s not just Long Covid. For instance, a close relative of a moderator, a young adult, was just diagnosed with an incurable cancer. The family is having to juggle duties to handle her care. IM Doc said that he has seen a “a veritable explosion of this type of cancer since COVID and/or vaccines.” He has also repeatedly on the marked rise in the number of other unusual cancers (with specifics) as well as the so-called “turbo cancer”.
Per an article Lambert included in Links yesterday, on how the “quad-demic” has swamped UK hospitals. We never had this sort of multi-infectious-disease siege before. It’s certainly correlated with the world after Covid. And there are theories that is it causal, such as Anthony Leonardi, who posits that Covid taxes T-cells, a second line of defense for contagions, leading to reduced immune system function and thus higher vulnerability to pathogens. Note T-cells also keep cancers at bay. And adults cannot replenish them.
So are the UK and other advanced economies seeing a rise in infrastructure maintenance backlogs, due to a decline in the population of skilled laborers needed to service them?
By Kurt Cobb, a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has also appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Le Monde Diplomatique, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. Originally published at OilPrice
- The escalating cost of maintaining aging infrastructure is causing widespread problems, as exemplified by America’s elevator crisis.
- Deferred maintenance and underinvestment in infrastructure can lead to cascading failures, impacting essential services like water, electricity, and transportation.
- The failure to adequately maintain infrastructure is a recurring pattern in human civilization, with potentially devastating consequences for modern cities.
I recently noticed that the elevator at my favorite cinema has been out of order for weeks now. The less mobile patrons need that elevator to transport them downward to this underground theater. I then learned of America’s “elevator crisis”and my mind wandered to the struggle to maintain the Roman Empire. I’ll explain the connection below. But first a refresher on Rome’s predicament:
The Roman emperor Trajan brought the Roman Empire to its greatest extent during his reign (98 to 117 A.D.) with his successful conquests in what we today would call the Middle East. Rome’s many conquests had been financed by booty taken from the conquered.
But its hold on the sprawling empire—one that reached from northern England to southern Egypt, from Spain in the west to what today is called Iraq in the east—would henceforth have to be financed by rising taxes and inflated currency. The money was needed to pay for armies and naval forces to defend the empire’s very long land and maritime borders. Building an empire turned out to be less expensive than maintaining one, including building and maintaining the infrastructure of roads and military and political outposts needed to protect and administer it.
What happened to Rome’s maintenance bill happens in any system of infrastructure as it expands. The existing infrastructure must be maintained even as new infrastructure is built. Eventually, it becomes very expensive 1) to pay collectively for maintenance of all existing infrastructure and 2) to pay for increasingly aging infrastructure that requires extra expense.
America’s elevators are in category number two. Elevators are a ubiquitous and absolutely necessary piece of infrastructure in a culture that depends on high-rise buildings for much of its living and commercial space. Unfortunately for those who rely on them, the workforce that knows how to fix elevators is aging. In addition, the right parts can be hard to come by for two reasons: 1) The companies that make elevator parts prioritize the biggest customers who are concentrated in places such as China where many new tall buildings are going up and 2) some elevators are so old that no ones makes mass produced parts for them and parts have to be custom-fabricated.
Out-of-order signs on elevators are particularly hard on those with disabilities and the elderly. And, nonworking elevators are thought to be a major cause of 1.1 million yearly accidents on stairs that lead to emergency room visits. Even for the young and vigorous, elevator failures, if frequent enough, could make buildings over a certain height uninhabitable. The long stairway down to my basement cinema almost certainly prevents many patrons from even thinking about attending showings there for now.
But elevators are just one part of the sprawling infrastructure that is the modern globalized world. Water systems in the United States are in serious trouble for the same reason, aging infrastructure. Building owners have incentives to maintain elevators to keep their building habitable. Most water systems are owned by municipalities and those municipalities must look to ratepayers to pay their bills. As the bills for system maintenance have skyrocketed, so have rates. But that may not be enough since in many towns, especially smaller ones, shrinking populations have made it difficult to raise enough money for repairs even with higher rates.
Many large infrastructure systems are now facing a reckoning for deferred maintenance or failure to plan for growing demands. The American electrical infrastructure suffers from both problems. The term of art is “modernizing.” But that just means making up for all the deferred maintenance AND expanding the size and capability of the system at the same time.
Next time you see an out-of-order sign on an elevator you’ll know a little of what’s behind it. And, it’s the same problem facing most of the world’s legacy infrastructure that will lead to more frequent boil-water notices from water utilities and power outages by electric utilities.
It is the pattern of human civilization to happily invest in infrastructure during a growth phase and then try to avoid the expense of maintaining that infrastructure when growth is over. That is a recipe for ruin as deferred maintenance makes it all the more likely that both private and public owners of infrastructure will be hit with huge and perhaps unpayable bills in the future. That pattern also risks making some part or even entire major systems unusable. It’s hard to imagine how any modern city could withstand prolonged outages of water, electricity or even of its elevators.
The new Learn to Code : Learn How to Fix Elevators and maybe, just maybe we will give you an H1B and a path towards citizenship. What’s next? Firefighters? The sky’s the limit. Had Littlefinger been alive today, he would say that “chaos is an elevator”.
With the same ideas still in effect about treatment, I’ll bet there will also be strange cancers developing after forthcoming viral outbreaks.
There’s a pertinent example at the Fine Arts Building in Chicago. This has its original manually-operated elevators, however as I understand they will be taken out of service in the next year.
No-one wants this to happen. The Victorian-era building retains much of its original interior, and the elevator operators (about four are employed) are a charming aspect of the experience. However, the parts required for continued operation can no longer be obtained/engineered/repaired. There will thus need to be some type of push-button elevator replacement, since the building can become tiring to navigate and inaccessible for some visitors if only stairs are available.
When I relocated from Boston area to Knoxville, I allowed myself to indulge in a lightly expensive antique artdeco lighting fixture called a milky white skyscraper globe light to replace the modern a-la-Lowes/Home Depot standard fixture in my new kitchen. When I tried to hang it where my Lowes light resided, it it required a 6 inch crossbar at the canopy to hang. Generally only 4 inch crossbars are made now, and so I had to look beyond Lowes-HD. Happily, right here in Tennessee is Antique Lamp Supply in McMinnville. It spots “fascinating” showroom that makes my want to visit based on its impressive video and picture online tour. Prices? Pretty rich. A high quality brass or chrome-likek nickle light canopy is about $60. Other parts similarly priced. It brought back memories of when I had a 1880 Victorian home in Boston which never failed to impress on the custom craftsmanship throughout the construction. Back when Americans “made things.”
I keep reading about the 3-D printed parts. Could this be an application?
To fabricate in metal, a Metal X 3d printer costs in excess of $100k and the materials are also very pricey and hazardous to use.
I’m far from an expert, but I would think that would require a lot of disassembly and then measurement of the parts to be replaced, including measurement of the strength of the materials etc.
Weren’t most elevators in the US once made by the Otis company? I used to see that name on countless elevators. I don’t see why it would be difficult to access their records to re-engineer the parts needed, unless they are no longer extant.
In my younger years I played a game called SimCity 2000 where natural disasters and such could lead to population decline, thus reducing my tax base, in turn reducing my ability to repair, build and expand, or buy hospitals, which lead to a doom spiral and game over. I don’t think I ever did find the solution.
In the game, was it required that you expand?
City expansion is what makes the game fun, more buildings, more citizens, more taxes, more building types. I mean, you could built out to a steady state and just let it run and run and build up tax revenue, and deal with any natural disasters that sometimes devastate the city.
I miss Atrain. You’d build rail lines, and have different types of trains and stations, then you could also profit off the increasing desirability of the land as people flocked to your railroad. You could speculate in theme parks, office buildings, the stock market, you name it! All in 16 colors, or possibly 256 if you had an MCGA display.
Fun times.
But expansionism is always the name of the game, “progress”.
It seems like the labor problems are a culmination of too many years of sending kids to college that were not college material. By that I mean they are extremely intelligent, just not meant to be in a classroom and getting burdened with a lot of useless debt. Trade and technical schools would have been better for their abilities. I think we’ve crossed paths with many like that in our lives, I sure have on building sites or in garages. Throw a box of engine parts, a pile of lumber, spools of wire or a load of pipe and fittings and they go to town. You can’t be a total dummy doing this stuff as you need to know how to read prints, understand specs. This work is, for a while anyway, not going to be outsourced to AI or to an office overseas so it’s not disappearing. But it sure is dirty, tough on your body, tough mentally and usually completely unappreciated too.
But really rewarding. It’s pretty neat to drive around and see the places you’ve built,or had an hand in constructing over the last 30+ years and the friendships made.
I’ll connect you with my coworkers & you can pet them on the head as “not college material,” calculating beam spread, -6dB edges & trajectory; while visualizing discontinuities, based upon empirical knowledge of metallurgic processing, cold working alloyed steel crystalline structure at heat-affected zones & relating this to real-time weld & fit-up radiography they’d assesed after witnessing TCVN impacts, read shear area & scribbled down yield to tensile ratios, carbon equivalents from their head; between tests for months of 84hr weeks after your 7th acute COVID infection & cascading PASC debilitation; as you rolled six ton 42″ pipe over your head, into 80′ automated girth-weld jacks, in a 120dB setting packed with sick, tired, pissed-off folks fleeing ICE, POs, deputies, skip-tracers & repo-men?
The problem is that the trades don’t keep up financially. You hear all the time about anecdotes, but the BLS data doesn’t lie. You will make more doing nursing, accounting, or teaching than the trades.
When I lived in LA, don’t remember water mains bursting as being a problem, maybe it happened every blue moon but that was it.
Seems much more commonplace now.
We’re reaching end of design life of the infrastructure built for suburban sprawl after WWII.
Maintaining that stuff is an afterthought, as new growth was supposed to take care of that. Add on the loss of capability – both human and manufacturing, it’s hard to be optimistic.
Design life for most water and sewer components is 75 years, but can be 50 years for new materials. Considering that the bulk of water and sewer systems were built in the WPA era (1933-1942), there’s a lot of pipe that needs to be replaced.
Much of it ****ing galvanized piping, especially pernicious under US ranch houses built on slabs.
Maintaining an empire requires a massive investment in the military to secure the periphery, and to maintain order within the realm. The much discussed Roman empire built the limes, an enormous infrastructure made of walls and forts to protect against Germanic tribes (stretching from what is nowadays the Netherlands to Romania), against Arab and Subsaharian peoples (ranging from Jordan to Algeria), as well as fortified cities against the Persians, and the Hadrian wall against Northern British tribes. The military almost always had priority in the imperial budget.
Now, the USA may have a decaying infrastructure at home, but for the past three decades have built a stupendous network of worldwide military bases, harbours, and massive embassies — plus spent inordinate amounts of money for a whole range of high-tech, but often supar and expensive weaponry. All those engineers, specialized workers, construction equipment, and resources have a long-term detrimental effect when withdrawn from civilian uses.
East Germany had rebuilt after WWII, and its infrastructure was reasonable (even if not at the same level as the West German one). By the late 1960s, when the staunchly pro-Soviet, doctrinarians led by Honecker overthrew Ulbricht and undid his reforms, a considerable fraction of resources went into the military and into securing the borders (including the infamous “wall”). By the late 1980s, lack of maintenance meant that the 1950s public and production infrastructure was in such a sorry state that, once reunification started, it was often better to simply rebuild it rather than repair or upgrade it. It also explains why the leaders of the GDR were eventually very much in favour of international disarmament treaties: they wanted to redirect resources towards desperately needed civilian uses.
“Next time you see an out-of-order sign on an elevator you’ll know a little of what’s behind it.”
Well, I now know a little less of what’s behind it with the article.
I would say that most infrastructure is is in trouble because of the profit priorities of private ownership over the public good.
Flint Michigan? Gasoline and tolls/taxes for what use now? Distribution grids and production kindly intermediated by ENRON antics? domestic use gas prices shooting through the roof in Texas after freezing when that issue was to be addressed under contract – but was not? Various collapsed bridges and etal from rentier influence in all government offices leading to unchecked profit priorities of private ownership over the public good. ?
But here we have no-one talented enough to do the work!!!!
BS
I suppose that it is all a matter of simple arithmetic. It can take years to get a person to be a fully trained, experienced technician such as an elevator repairman but it only takes Covid a week or so to take them out of the picture, sometimes for good.
Math checks put.
In the Boomers time most had some minor experience with carpentry, metal work, landscapping, etc… by the time they graduated high-school (many had it in middle school but certainly by the time they reached high school they had some experience). It wasn’t just shop class (which did help), they practiced these skills at home.
I mention this because having those early experiences in trades made the blue collar transition post high-school easier and the expense of training lower for all involved.
But that early trade experience has diminished in every successive generation. Not just the removal of shop class but families don’t utilize and train those skills.
I say all that because I don’t think we can credential our way out of this particular skill deficit.
Essential workers – who make or fix things – pay full social security tax plus income tax and all fees.
Investors/financiers/traders pay lower capital gains rates, with lots of exclusions, while they skim profits created by essential worker, and raise worker prices.
End stage does not work well with declining and aging population.
Even WORSE, as COVID’s Great Reset seems to base itself upon 1099’d & or refugee labor (whom, even if solvent, housed, documented, credentialled are frequently uninsured, indentured into gig-serfdom as PASC/ acute damage expenses cascade for their extended families) ergo, are seldom in any position to benefit from independent contractor percs?
Absolutely! I’ve been considering for years now, that the senseless sacrificing of the elderly in this country — ongoing — is reducing further the capacity to provide unpaid care, such as childcare, of which we already have a chronic shortage. This necessarily pulls people from the workforce that would otherwise be available, to say nothing of removing seniors themselves from the workforce, as too many had to keep working even into retirement, but now cannot, as Biden’s COVID policy ensures that they’re no longer among the living.
Although the roman empire was unlikely a lean economy like the modern western economies, plagues played a role in Rome’s downfall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_plague_pandemic
Its likely the loss of key persons played a role. For example, in Israel its been estimated that about 300,000 workers are responsible to keep their high tech economy functional. Remove 10% for a plague and its a problem. Remove 50% as refugees….
And I would argue it’s a domino effect – degradation of a water system leads to waterborne disease that leads to the death of an engineer, and so on. Ok, not a great example. But if a system is lean it has problems with knock on effects – in nature, this is called resiliency.
Add to the Antonine and Cyprian plagues the brain damage resulting from the systematic use of lead — for water pipes, cooking ware, and even as a sweetener — and we have a demographically depleted, cognitively impaired populace which must prevent a vast empire from decaying.
thanks for the lead reminder – Covid (and potentially its vax) also impair neurological function. So its not just key engineers and scientists and doctors dying, but also living in a brain fog! A fascinating historical direction (and scary current problem). Given the ongoing covid waves ad infinitum, it has functional similarity to lead pipes (which were for the rich and knowledge workers – the poor drank from streams and hand wells – here the poor avoided covid vaccines for a variety of reasons and thanks to higher sun exposure and vitamin D levels, less severe covid and or non-symptomatic covid – we have a team of landscapers every weekend working here in s California and covid had no effect on them (and no vaccines).
Very interesting article and commentary.
If you go to FRED, you can check out the labor force participation series.
All ages: CIVPART
25-54 (‘Prime’): LNS11300060
55+ : LNS11324230
Notice the overall rate is down from 2020, driven by the drop in 55+ participation after 2020. Could be early retirements, dropping out of labor force due to disability, or (sadly) death.
The ‘Prime’ age segment is maxed out (based on recent history) so hard to see where additional labor supply will come from (I guess immigration but that has its own issues).
I am always reminded of Bill and Hill’s first date, when they crossed a picket line at the Yale Art Museum and scabbed so they could vacantly gaze upon vapid Rothko color fields. I once got into it at a book signing with Joe Stieglitz over the arithmetical impossibility of everyone being in the 95th percentile and that we need skilled trades more than Stanford PhD’s to keep our cars running and to prevent our houses from burning down.
It is elite self-regard and status-seeking combined with resource hoarding and rationing that are already bringing on the collapse of our civilization. I see every day how our cloistered elites delude themselves that their own security isn’t interconnected with the well-being of others. The pandemic certainly accelerated the brain-drain in the skilled trades needed to maintain the infrastructure necessary for public health and safety.