Aging infrastructure is becoming a growing problem for public and private entities around the world.
We continue to mourn the loss of life in the recent high rise condo building collapse in Surfside, Fla. While the investigation remains ongoing, alarms were raised as early as 2018 about cracked concrete and damaged beams throughout the complex.
The Surfside tragedy, along with other recent events such as extreme heat that caused roads to buckle in the Pacific Northwest and a pedestrian bridge in Washington, DC that had been deemed to be in poor condition later collapsing have made people more conscious about the structural integrity of the roads they travel and the buildings they inhabit every single day.
Premise CEO Maury Blackman recently wrote in an op-ed for Fortune that before the advent of the smartphone, identifying potential warning signs in crumbling infrastructure could be a costly and time consuming endeavor.
With just about everyone carrying a smartphone with a HD camera in their pockets these days, however, he envisions a solution that would be easy to implement for public and private businesses. This involves empowering the people who travel those roads and inhabit those buildings every day to identify potential problem areas and document them so that action can be taken quicker if it is deemed necessary. Doing so has the potential to save money and lives in the long run by identifying more small problems in more infrastructure before those problems become much larger ones.
Read more from Maury on how crowd empowerment can be used to identify areas of improvement for aging infrastructure here.
Want to learn more about how Premise’s network of global Contributors can help you improve your infrastructure assessment? Contact us for a demo today.