[JoeAltmaier]

Oh America at least has an immense infrastructure backlog. Roads, bridges, water systems. Especially water systems! They get neglected until they break, then its a five-alarm emergency to get the pumps going before everybody has a living room full of sewage.

My relative worked at Crane Pumps for years; every order was a fix-on-failure emergency order. For pumps designs that went back 50 years - they were commonly pulling plans on paper out of drawers in storage rooms to match exactly the specs for some ancient pump in Pocatella or Poughkeepsie.

When Obama had that shovel-ready infrastructure effort, they expected a big upswing in business. But nope; nothing. Probably because water systems are underground and invisible. They wanted splashey visible activity like road-building. Which IMHO accomplished exactly the opposite of what was intended - they built MORE infrastructure to support.

[seanmcdirmid]

But remember the US has first world problems. Chinese were absolutely baffled by the Flint water crisis....why would stupid Americans think tap water was safe to drink even after boiling?

Drainage in the USA is also a magnitude better than in china. I'm sure hey could use upgrades, and I'm sure there is a bias to showy projects, but it is nothing compared to what happens in the guo.

[HillaryBriss]

> ... they were commonly pulling plans on paper out of drawers in storage rooms to match exactly the specs for some ancient pump in Pocatella or Poughkeepsie.

That is awesome. Thank you for the info.

When a company like Crane Pumps goes out of business because cheaper imports take over its market, all that information (the paper plans from past pump designs) probably gets lost forever. Once the company folds, these small cities all over the country cannot replace their old pumps and instead have to upgrade the system to make it compatible with a new pump model.

I wonder if global trade economists account for that additional cost to the customers when the old domestic supplier goes away.

[chiph]

The cynic in me is thinking that for the shovel-ready projects, they looked no further than the government's own facilities backlog.