A Hidden Cost To Fossil Fuels: Infrastructure Damage – CleanTechnica

A few days ago, I was visiting town and noticed an unusual number of emergency vehicles passing by. After the third fire truck left a fire station across the street from where we were, my wife suggested we try to figure out what’s going on. It didn’t take us long to see a huge plume of thick, black smoke in the distance, and all of the police, fire, and EMS vehicles were headed in that direction. Most normal, cautious people would have headed in the opposite direction, but we let our curiosity get the best of us.

At first, it seemed like a smaller fire a few blocks away, but the more we moved, the more the enormity of the smoke cloud became apparent. But, we still couldn’t see the flames, as they were behind what looked like blocks and then miles of trees and small buildings. Eventually, we went to the very edge of town, to the place where I-10 and I-25 meet. It was there that we saw the flames, and they were dozens of feet tall, and that was on top of the bridge the flames were originating from.

It turned out to be a fuel tanker that was burning, and it ultimately ended up burning for nearly two hours before the flames could be extinguished. From what I’ve read, the driver managed to escape, but it’s likely that their behavior was the cause of the accident. Instead of slowing down for the curve on the ramp from I-10 to I-25, the truck went through the curve quickly enough to tip over, striking the side barrier and ultimately bursting into flames.

Even worse, the fuel didn’t all catch fire at the same time, and some of it spread in all directions before burning. Some of it ran up and down the bridge’s surface, scorching it all over. Other fuel dripped down into expansion joints, carrying the flames deep into the bridge’s structure. When we went to take a look at the bridge later that night, when all of the action was over and all of the emergency workers had gone to other places, we found that the damage was rather extreme.

The flames had burned so hot that they managed to put a crack all the way through the concrete on the bridge. According to media reports referencing NMDOT, the bridge won’t need to be rebuilt, but it will need a lot of repair to be usable again. From what I could see, the steel girders below the concrete were intact, so they’re probably right. But, the bridge will be out for weeks.

The picture isn’t great, but the point where the bridge meets a section of ground had (definitely past tense) a decorative cover over the end of a retaining wall. The fuel not only ran down the face of it, burning and charring it, but managed to seep inside of the retaining wall, cracking and destroying the face of the concrete, exposing rebar. For those unfamiliar, rebar is short for reinforcing bar, strips of metal meant to strengthen concrete and make it more structurally strong, so clearly this concrete wasn’t just decorative beneath the surface that had been destroyed.

From what the state Department of Transportation is saying, our region has been spared the worst of what could have happened. Had the driver crashed just a few yards back, it seems like the whole bridge could have been rendered structurally unsound. But, the bridge seems repairable, and we’ll only be without it for a few weeks. The main interstates are both still open, and people going from one interstate to the other can cut through town or take a U-turn at the next exit to switch highways.

Other communities have not been as lucky as the one in New Mexico where this happened. For example, there’s last month’s bridge collapse of I-95 in Pennsylvania, and as this news report mentions, there was another similar collapse in Georgia in 2017 — both caused by tanker trucks that had gone up in flames.

In fact, accidents like this happen all the time. A news search for “tanker explosion” shows so many of them that I could write ten articles exploring the consequences of them all. YouTube and other video sites also show tons and tons of these fires killing people, destroying businesses and homes, and otherwise messing up lives.

And, this is just when we consider tankers pulled behind trucks. Railroads are carrying even bigger explosive loads through cities and towns, and incidents like the Lac-Megantic Rail Disaster, East Palestine Train Derailment, and many many others have killed, maimed, impoverished, and even destroyed entire towns.

In the face of these disasters, we try to put on a brave face. I mean, we can’t live without these risks, right? Fossil fuels power so much of modern life that eliminating these threats to life and property seems like an almost impossible task. Some people don’t want to try to tackle this problem at all, because they’re either making money directly from it or are getting donations from those who do.

In the wake of Philadelphia’s recent bridge collapse, Governor Josh Shapiro tried to turn a bad sign (the literal etymology of the word disaster: dis=bad, aster=star) into a political win:

I-95 is open to traffic.

We worked together and showed what it looks like when government works for the people. We can do big things here in Pennsylvania. pic.twitter.com/QP7wc10ov3

— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) June 24, 2023

Sure, they managed to get the freeway going again in under two weeks, but anybody looking at the video can see that the bridge wasn’t repaired at all. It was temporarily replaced with a couple of retaining walls and paved over. Yes, interstate traffic continues to flow, but a vital link between homes, businesses, and other destinations on both sides of the highway has been severed in the process. Building interstate highways across and through cities was already a big hit to the areas (primarily through minority neighborhoods) decades ago, but now they’ve gone from losing space to cutting parts of the city off from each other entirely.

What makes these losses so tragic is that future ones could be avoided. We shouldn’t be carrying tons of chemical energy around in loads approaching 40 tons that can go off like bombs just to waste 3/4 of it burning it in primitive piles of pistons. Wires could just as easily carry less energy, and we could be using that energy to charge batteries that burst into flames 20 times less often than the gas tanks of ICE vehicles.

Instead of pretending that these risks are a normal part of life, we should instead work to get rid of them almost entirely.

Featured image by Jennifer Sensiba.

 

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