Worth Paying For

When conservatives tell you that government is useless and that public infrastructure spending is money taxpayers are throwing down the rathole, consider last night's San Bruno gas line explosion and the true cost of maintenance.

There will be investigations and there will be denials and equivocation, but I've managed to put this much together from tweets and reports posted to journalists' blogs:

• The ruptured main belongs to Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)
• The pipe that ruptured was installed in 1948
• Residents in the area had smelled gas for 3 weeks. When it was reported, some were told to shut their garage doors; others were told not to worry about it. (note: those tweets were people reacting in real time to TV reports and interviews)
• People are still missing. Expect the death toll to rise.
• The force of the explosion also stopped the water supply, making it much more difficult to fight the fire.
• PG&E's president was interviewed, but managed to cover himself and duck any hard questions in the process about whether reports of a gas leak had not received priority attention.
• At the time of this writing, it is reported that 45 homes have been lost with hundreds more damaged.

A neighborhood exploded. Just like that. It was there one minute, gone the next, apparently the victim of a deteriorating 62-year old cylinder in the ground that wore out, blew out, and exploded after rupturing the ground above it. That cylinder is just one of many old, deteriorating lines.

And right now, early in the game, we're left with questions about whether that pipe was properly maintained, whether the right amount of attention was paid to reports of a gas leak in the area, and whether PG&E has adequately invested in keeping their equipment safe and up-to-date.

This is a company that spent $46 million dollars to buy a California ballot initiative in the primary to keep municipalities from maintaining their own utilities. 

But the free market means that PG&E has every reason to spend money in order to maintain their infrastructure, right?  So they would never let anything crazy negligent happen like a massive gas line eruption that would destroy dozens of homes and kill people, right?  Especially after the efforts to get public spending for infrastructure maintenance pulled in order to save taxpayer money, because people in Los Angeles should be spending their tax dollars to fix problems in San Diego, and that's a wasteful and inefficient misappropriation of funds and all that?

After all, if you want to use infrastructure, you should pay for it individually, because that's the only equitable and fair way.

In what Mr. DiSimone called his Free Limit Plan, he would give Nevadans and nonresidents the option to drive up to 90 miles an hour on state roads. The privilege would cost $25 a day and would conservatively generate more than $1 billion a year in new state revenue, he said.

“A year ago, when I put this plan together, every time I saw a highway patrol by the roadside, I’d pull over and ask them about it,” he said. “I stopped counting around 27 or 28 conversations, and based on what they told me, I estimate about 30 to 40 percent of drivers would be interested in doing it.”

The Invisible Hand of the Free market guarantees that people driving at 90 won't cause any problems, right?  Just like it prevented anything bad from happening in San Bruno, California.  After all when you change the motivation for infrastructure spending to profit margins and not safety tolerances...well...you literally get what you pay for, yes?

Just like the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.  Just like toxic waste disposal facilities.  Just like chemical plants and oil refineries.  Just like...where you live and work and drive.