Podcast: The Infrastructure Show

Crossing the Piscataqua River at Portsmouth, N.H., the Sarah Mildred Long Bridge carries both road and rail traffic between Maine and New Hampshire. Its unique three-position vertical lift design accommodates recreational and less frequent commercial marine traffic, as well as occasional rail movements, in different ways to minimize delays to all users.To understand the functioning of this modern incarnation of its nearly 80-year old predecessor, we talk with Jeff Folsom, who is Assistant Program Manager/Design for the Maine Department of Transportation

People began laying undersea cables to carry telegraph messages over 170 years ago. Today, modern submarine cables connect all continents except Antarctica, and even in the age of satellites, their importance in delivering global connectivity continues to grow.To help us understand the intricacies of these invisible links, we talk with Chris Carobene, Vice President of Marine and Network Construction for SubCom, which designs, manufactures, deploys, maintains, and operates undersea cables

Salt Lake City is replacing the landside infrastructure of its airport with a 21st century facility while airline operations continue. In fact, the slowdown in air travel due to the corona virus has presented airport management with an opportunity to accelerate construction and cut costs.To describe plans for the updated airport and how the pandemic was used to advantage, we talk with Bill Wyatt, Executive Director of the Salt Lake City International Airport

Rising sea level driven by climate change is threatening some coastal settlements with more frequent flooding and potential inundation. For some, the time may come to consider relocating to higher ground. This is a controversial and costly option, a difficult choice for communities and their leaders.In this podcast we talk with A.R. Siders, Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy and Administration, who is a leading researcher on the topic of strategic retreat

When aging infrastructure needs repair or replacement, a primary challenge is finding the money. Bay City, Michigan, northwest of Detroit, faced this problem with two key bridges, and the community ultimately decided to sell the bridges to a private consortium that will pay for improvements and collect tolls to finance the projects.In this podcast, we learn how Bay City is addressing its bridge issues from the town’s City Manager, Dana Muscott

Sometimes obsolete infrastructure can become a new asset. That’s Washington, D.C.’s plan for an unneeded highway bridge over the Anacostia River. The 11th Street Bridge Park, set for construction starting in 2021, will bring green and hard-surface open space, event venues, and new access to the river itself to the southeast sector of the District of Columbia.In this podcast, Scott Kratz, Director of the project, gives us the details of this new urban feature

Hampton Roads isn’t a road, but a body of water that links the James, Elizabeth and other rivers to the Atlantic Ocean. It is surrounded by Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and several other cities, and it’s the home of U.S. Naval sea and air operations and the Newport News shipyard. Several busy bridge-tunnel combinations span the 4-mile channel, and growing highway congestion has motivated the construction of another bay crossing.To learn the why and how of this latest mega-crossing we talk with project director James Utterback of the Virginia Department of Transportation

Persistent flooding in the upper Midwest poses risks to navigation on the Upper Mississippi River. Erosion and sedimentation are reducing channel depths and creating sandbars that block or reduce the capacity of barge tows carrying agricultural and other bulk products. This puts extra demand on channel dredging, which is the responsibility of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.To understand both the problems and responses, we talk with Steve Tapp, Operations Manager in charge of dredging and channel maintenance for the St. Paul District of the Army Corps

Colorado gets plenty of snow in the winter – some mountain areas dig out of as much as 40 feet in a season. Keeping the state roads open and safe for trucks and cars is both important and demanding.To find out more about how it’s done, the role technology is playing, we are speaking with Kyle Lester, who is Director of Maintenance and Operations for the Colorado Dept. of Transportation

Managing stormwater in cities is important to reduce flooding and secure people and property. Stormwater needs some kind of treatment before it flows to surface waters, and that treatment can be essential in older areas where stormwater and sanitary waste are collected in combined sewers. The Chicago area has built a network of underground tunnels to store that stormwater for later treatment before it goes to the river.To understand this extraordinary project we’re talking with Kevin Fitzpatrick, Managing Civil Engineer for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, who works on what is called the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan