WAS MIAMI'S BLACKOUT AN INFRASTRUCTURE REDFLAG?

GlobeSt blogger Jonathan D. Miller is chin deep now in theauthorship of his next infrastructure study, his annual opus dueout in May and sponsored by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst& Young. So we turned to him for the commentary on last week'sQuick Poll, which obviously had more to do with the state of theinfrastructure of US cities than it did with Miami's blackout. Ourpoll-takers got that point, with only 20% blaming the outage on aNuke Fluke, compared with the 80% who see it as Another Sign of OurCorroding Infrastructure. Miller, who is also a partner in theManhattan-based consulting firm Miller Ryan, says that, poll statsaside, the American public doesn't yet see the danger our citiesare in. Here's why:

"If Miami was a yellow flag, Katrina was a red flag and so wasthe Minneapolis bridge collapse, which people have largelydismissed at this point. The same is true of the 2003Northeast/Midwest blackout. There were some improvements made, butit was pointed out that the electric grid in this country is in abackward state. There haven't been many major changes and there'sno real national policy about electric power generation. It's leftmostly to the private sector.