Lori Falce: Infrastructure costs one way or another

Since the beginning, civilization has been built on infrastructure — even before there was infrastructure.

When we were just nomadic tribes, the framework was about who was hunting and who was gathering, the paths to follow and the water to find. Wheels and fire changed those.

The Egyptians might have constructed temples and pyramids planning for the afterlife, but their day-to-day was about creating a life in the desert with irrigation to grow food and granaries to store it. The Romans ruled the ancient world as much by the roads they paved across it as with the armies that conquered it.

Infrastructure is that skeleton that lies under the world — seen or unseen, physical or systematic — that makes everything work. That has to be maintained, and it has to be protected. It’s how we safeguard transportation and trade, diplomacy and defense.

And that is why every politician champions infrastructure as a magic bullet — because it is. They just tend to forget that when it’s time to pay for it.

I covered meetings of a Central Pennsylvania school district that had a large central junior high in the middle of town. For years, a new roof was on the list of projects as they planned the budget. For years it was crossed out. The same happened with the huge, inefficient boilers that needed to be replaced with something more cost-effective.

It should have surprised no one when years of neglect of these two items made the building increasingly expensive to operate and ultimately resulted in a multimillion- dollar construction project of a whole new building instead of investing $50,000 in a roof project that would have lasted decades and a few hundred thousand in a heating system upgrade.

We pay for maintaining our infrastructure — or we might for not doing so.

The U.S. learned that lesson with the hacking of the Colonial Pipeline, which has cost the company almost $5 million in its ransom to cybercriminals with roots in Russia and Eastern Europe, but also cost people and companies across the country in lost time and money as gas became a premium commodity.

“This is a cyber cancer. You want to die, or you want to live? It’s not a situation where you can wait,” Ondrej Krehel, CEO and founder of digital forensics firm LIFARS, told Bloomberg News.

Today’s infrastructure is not just the tangible like the pipeline itself. It is the code that runs it, the internet that connects us, the systems we depend on.

The Biden administration is pushing for infrastructure improvement, just as the Trump administration touted the same. But we all have to be aware of what is required to maintain, update and protect our infrastructures — whether public or private, asphalt interstate or information superhighway — because one way or another, we will pay for it.