A web of infrastructure supports our modern world.

How do we keep it working?

You know, if you go to the homepage of any major newspaper,

I guarantee you there will be a few stories that, like it or not,

relate to climate change and infrastructure.

It's Wednesday, November 14th, and it's Infrastructure Week.

Oops, I mean, it's Science Friday.

I'm Sci-Fi producer Shishana Booksbound.

I'll admit I'm a total infrastructure nerd.

You can sometimes find me ogling the massive machinery at the Red Hook shipping container port in Brooklyn.

But it's sometimes easy

to forget just how critical, well-functioning infrastructure is in our everyday lives.

Ira Flato talks with the author of a new book about what it takes to make infrastructure work

and keep working. My next guest has thought a lot about the role of infrastructure in our lives, both big and small,

and how we're going to have to adjust our embedded infrastructure to climate change.

Let me introduce her.

Dr. Deb, excuse me, Dr. Deb Chachra, author of how infrastructure works inside the systems that shape our world and professor of engineering at the Olin College of Engineering based in Needham, Massachusetts.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

Nice to have you. I want to let our listeners in on our secret.

If they have some infrastructure they want to ask about or brag about or tell us there's something wrong about it, a bridge, a building, water systems, or maybe there's an infrastructure that's most needs to be made.

What do you think?

...