The "stimulus" dollars in this area and in N.E. Illinois was spent on road resurface and bridge repair. Cook co., Illinois and surrounding counties referred to locally as "collar counties" are where the jobs are. Tens of thousands commute daily to Chicago and an area called the Northwest Corridor, a large area just N.W. of the city. All the arterial roads, and many, many smaller "town roads" were torn up since spring. A couple things come to mind: All the projects had new signs about 3X5 proclaiming stimulus money providing infrastructure improvement and jobs. Cost of the signs in Illinois was $800,000. All the jobs created were high paying construction related jobs. A lot of these non arterial roads were prematurely resurfaced, kinda like "busy work". I used to travel them every day. Non of the stimulus money went to recovery of the "everymans" jobs that have all but disappeared. What I'm saying is the whole thing looks like a giant dog n pony show designed to convince people the administration is actually doing something. Whatever gov. dept. that's responsible for inspecting the owners of underground pipelines, power grids, etc., should be working their butts off 7X24 to make sure the owners of said utility's are conducting proactive repairs. Such things are not visible to the public however so they're on the back burner.

There's an emmence BP/Amoco refinery about 8 miles north of me. 50 year old pipelines run under my city. Hardly a month goes by that one of these lines doesn't spring a leak. Currently there's a leak about 1.5 miles from me they've dug up and been working on for a month.

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SOS USA