Crumbling Infrastructure

How America's Aging Systems Amplify Natural Disasters

Climate change is making extreme weather more frequent and severe, but it's America's crumbling infrastructure that's turning storms into catastrophes.

In February 2021, a winter storm brought Texas to its knees—not just because of the cold, but because the state's power grid failed spectacularly. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses were left without power, some for several days. At least 246 people were killed directly or indirectly, with some estimates as high as 702 killed as a result of the crisis. The grid came within minutes of complete collapse, which could have taken weeks to restore.

This disaster exemplifies a troubling reality: America's aging, underfunded infrastructure is not just failing to protect us from extreme weather—it's making natural disasters far worse. As climate change intensifies storms, floods, heat waves, and wildfires, our deteriorating systems are creating cascading failures that transform manageable events into humanitarian crises.

The Escalating Cost of Infrastructure Failure

The numbers paint a stark picture of America's infrastructure vulnerability. 2024 saw 27 "billion-dollar" weather and climate disasters in the United States, causing a tragic 568 deaths across the country, with total damages reaching over $182 billion. These figures represent the second-highest number of such disasters since records began in 1980.

But the true scope of the problem extends far beyond individual weather events. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $9.1 trillion would be needed over the next 10 years to bring America's infrastructure to a state of good repair, while planned investments amount to only $5.4 trillion, leaving a gap of $3.7 trillion. This massive shortfall means millions of Americans live with infrastructure that was never designed to handle today's extreme weather.

How Failing Infrastructure Magnifies Disasters

The Power Grid: When the Lights Go Out, Everything Stops

America's electrical grid illustrates how infrastructure failures create cascading disasters. Infrastructure is often interconnected, meaning that damage to one component can have cascading effects on others. For example, a damaged power grid can disrupt communication networks, water supply systems, and healthcare facilities, compounding the challenges of disaster response and recovery.

The 2021 Texas freeze demonstrated this interconnectedness catastrophically. During the February 2021 winter storm, transmission companies inadvertently cut power to parts of the natural gas supply chain when ERCOT ordered the utilities to reduce power demand or risk further damage to the grid. That decision aggravated the problem as natural gas producers were unable to deliver enough fuel to power plants. The result was a feedback loop: power plants needed natural gas to generate electricity, but natural gas facilities needed electricity to operate.

In 2021, winter storms plunged Texas into frigid temperatures and widespread power outages. These crippled critical infrastructure and disrupted business operations across various sectors, resulting in economic losses estimated to be more than USD 200 billion. The human toll was even more devastating, with hundreds dying from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and other storm-related causes.

Water Systems: The Hidden Vulnerability

While power outages grab headlines, water infrastructure failures during extreme weather can be equally deadly. Wildfires leave a toxic legacy, polluting water and cutting access to it. Ash and debris contaminate water sources, requiring costly treatment and, potentially, water shortages. The wildfires in California in 2018 caused tens of billions worth of damages for infrastructure repairs, including of water systems and treatment facilities. Millions of Californians were affected by water-quality concerns.

Flooding compounds these problems by overwhelming treatment plants and contaminating supplies. Natural disasters like floods can compromise water supply systems, contaminating the water and making it unsafe to drink. This scarcity of clean water can quickly become a humanitarian crisis, leading to the spread of waterborne diseases and exacerbating the emergency situation.

Levees and Flood Control: The Catastrophic Consequences of Deferred Maintenance

Perhaps no infrastructure failure illustrates the amplification effect better than Hurricane Katrina's levee breaches in 2005. The storm surge, extreme amounts of rain, and high winds stressed the city's complex 350 mile levee system to its breaking point. Several of the levees and floodwalls were overtopped, and some were breached throughout the day of landfall. It was these overtoppings and breaches of the levee system that led to the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans.

The scale of America's levee problem is staggering. Over 100,000 miles of levees are built in all 50 states; these barriers protect homes, businesses and critical infrastructure like highways and power plants from flooding. The problem is, most of these levees are over 50 years old, and many were never built to last longer than a couple of decades. Even more alarming, according to the Army Corp of Engineers, there could be as many as 100,000 miles of levees that have never been inspected.

Of the small percentage that have been inspected, 11.6 percent were rated likely to fail during a flood. With climate change bringing more intense precipitation events, these aging earthen barriers face unprecedented stress.

Transportation Networks: When Roads Become Rivers

Transportation infrastructure failures during disasters don't just strand motorists—they cripple emergency response and economic recovery. Floods cripple the interconnectivity of transportation networks, causing local disruptions that ripple into regional travel issues and hinder emergency response systems. This can have significant economic consequences, as seen in the 2021 Germany floods, where road and railway infrastructure damage cost an estimated USD 2 billion, with long-term closures further impacting mobility and hindering economic recovery.

Transportation networks, including roads, bridges, railways, and airports, are critical for the movement of goods, emergency responders, and the evacuation of affected populations during natural disasters. Damage to these networks can severely impede disaster response efforts and slow down recovery.

The Aging Infrastructure Crisis

America's infrastructure was largely built in the post-World War II boom, with much of it designed for a 50-year lifespan that's now expiring. Many countries face the challenge of aging infrastructure that was not designed to withstand the increased frequency and intensity of modern natural disasters. The American Society of Civil Engineers has consistently graded U.S. infrastructure poorly, with the 2025 report card giving an overall grade of C—the highest ever awarded, but still indicating significant deficiencies.

The problem isn't just age but design standards. Much of America's infrastructure was built for the climate of the 20th century, not the extreme weather patterns we're experiencing today. As climate change increases the frequency and severity of rain events, the added strain on levees (97% of which are earthen) is likely to raise the total cost of levee rehabilitation projects.

Research Reveals the Amplification Effect

Scientific studies are quantifying how infrastructure failures multiply disaster impacts. Research drawing on over 700 historic hazard footprints of floods and tropical cyclones found that infrastructure failure cascades quintuple risk of storm and flood-induced service disruptions across the globe. This means that when infrastructure fails during extreme weather, the resulting disruptions are five times worse than they would be with resilient systems.

The interconnected nature of modern infrastructure means that failures cascade through multiple systems. Such network-based approaches have proven valuable for capturing interdependencies between large-scale infrastructure systems and a region's population, to compute people's access to services, and to mimic functional failure cascades and service disruptions from severe events.

Climate Change: The Stress Multiplier

Climate change is acting as a force multiplier on infrastructure stress. Human-caused climate change, primarily driven by fossil fuel use, is rapidly worsening as the planet warms and is contributing to many of these types of disasters—including extreme heat, wildfires, droughts, intensified storms and flooding. Extreme weather events are also adding undue stress to the U.S. electric grid and other essential infrastructure.

The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are increasing beyond what our infrastructure was designed to handle. Earth's hottest year on record intensified multiple destructive and deadly wildfires in 2024, while across the country, there were over 1700 tornadoes total, more than any other year except 2011.

The Equity Dimension

Infrastructure failures don't affect all communities equally. Research on the 2021 Texas freeze revealed significant disparities: Black respondents were more likely to report outages lasting 24+ hours and that younger individuals and those with lower educational attainment were less likely to be prepared for outages. This reflects broader patterns where marginalized communities often live with older, less resilient infrastructure and have fewer resources to cope with failures.

These disasters affected every region of the country, reverberating throughout the economy, harming homeowners and renters, farmers, insurance markets, business operations, critical infrastructure, public health and more, while creating disproportionate hardships for low-income communities and communities of color.

The Path Forward: Building Resilience

The solution requires a fundamental shift from reactive disaster response to proactive resilience building. Economic analysis from the Federal Emergency Management Agency found that every $1 invested to reduce disaster risk saves the nation an average of $4 in response and recovery costs.

Modernizing Design Standards

Infrastructure must be built for tomorrow's climate, not yesterday's weather patterns. ASCE recommends that modernization and replacement projects should include prioritizing resilience to withstand extreme weather; however, this may add to upfront costs. The alternative—continued catastrophic failures—costs far more in the long run.

Embracing Natural Solutions

Using the Earth's natural defenses against storms makes sense, given that the U.S. can't afford to stop all flooding by building more levees, dams, and seawalls. Healthy wetlands, salt marshes, dunes, and free-flowing rivers can act as holding basins for floodwaters, decreasing the effects of flooding on people, homes, and businesses in adjacent communities while providing habitat for fish and wildlife.

Systemic Thinking

Future infrastructure planning must account for interdependencies and cascading failures. Creating redundancy in critical systems, such as power grids and communication networks, ensures that if one component fails, others can continue to operate. This is particularly important for maintaining essential services during and after a disaster.

The Cost of Inaction

The stakes couldn't be higher. With the United Nations now warning that the world is on track to hit 3.1 degrees celsius of warming, it is more critical than ever that the U.S. leads the globe on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, to avoid the most catastrophic potential impacts of climate change. And with 20+ major disasters per year as the new normal, adaptation strategies like wetland restoration that build natural resilience to weather extremes will become crucial.

Without massive investment in infrastructure resilience, America faces a future where every storm becomes a potential catastrophe, every flood a humanitarian crisis, and every heat wave a deadly emergency. The question isn't whether we can afford to upgrade our infrastructure—it's whether we can afford not to.

The choice is stark: invest in resilience now, or pay exponentially more in disaster recovery later. As extreme weather becomes the new normal, our infrastructure can either be our shield or our Achilles' heel. The decision we make today will determine which future we inhabit tomorrow.