ASCE Infrastructure Report Card

Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) releases a Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. The report card is meant to describe the current state of infrastructure in the United States in a familiar form -- letter grades. It is a great way to connect policy makers and concerned citizens to infrastructure, which is sometimes confusing to understand. Both national level and state level report cards are produced so that states can understand their specific infrastructure needs. The report card is broken into more than a dozen subsectors of infrastructure, including energy, schools and inland waterways.

 

My Contribution

Volunteer members of ASCE write the report card and assign grades based on whether infrastructure meets the needs of the communities it serves. I worked with a team of three other colleagues to write the stormwater section of Maryland's 2020 Infrastructure Report Card. Stormwater had never before been included in the Maryland report card but is a crucial aspect of infrastructure, especially in Maryland where the Chesapeake Bay is an enormously important but vulnerable natural resource. Because of innovative efforts to protect water quality of the Bay, the state also has been seen as a model for stormwater management.

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Using other states' sections on stormwater from previous years as a guide, we decided to break the assessment into seven sections: Capacity, Condition, Operation and Maintenance, Funding and Future Need, Public Safety, Resilience, and Innovation. I researched and wrote the Capacity, Condition, and Operation and Maintenance sections. It was disappointing to find how difficult it was to get data about the state of critical infrastructure online. One source which was helpful is StormwaterPrint, a mapping web application published by the Maryland Department of Environment (MDE). Although it was possible to get some information about stormwater infrastructure from StormwaterPrint, it would be difficult for someone without basic knowledge of stormwater and geographic information systems to interpret the data. The limited amount of available data and the fact that available data may be difficult to interpret motivated me even more to provide a digestible assessment of stormwater infrastructure in Maryland.