The credit crisis caused Athens-Clarke County, Ga., to delay a $221 million bond issue planned for the day Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. The county has been planning for 10 years to upgrade three sewage treatment plants built more than 40 years ago when the population was much smaller.

To put that in perspective, Atlanta-Fulton County performs major capacity expansions and equipment upgrades on a 5-year cycle (or smaller). They do minor upgrades to outdated/disfunctional equipment constantly. And, they plan all upgrades on population estimates at least 10 years in the future.

I'm working on a small upgrade for a wastewater plant in the Atlanta area which was built 30 years ago and has also had no major upgrades since. The electrical system is so outdated that it has caught fire in two separate locations. There are no record drawings (which reconcile differences between the design drawings and what the contractor actually installed), so before any upgrade you have to reverse engineer everything AND put it into a computer-aided design program. Not to mention that none of the existing structures were designed to be expanded, so you'll have to get really creative in your preliminary engineering before the County can commit to any upgrades. To start design work on one of these facilities is therefore in the millions of dollars, much less the full design, materials and equipment, and construction costs of the finished product.

In short, this is bad for Athens, all municipalities, and all white-collar jobs tied to their revenue stream, e.g. mine and a host of others. Let's hope Congress gets off their asses SOON.

-janelane, engineer especial