The Infrastructurist blog shut down in January—but not because we have been paying more attention to our aging infrastructure.

Rivers and canals carry an enormous amount of goods through the hinterlands—coal, grain, fuel oil. Water transport is cheaper than railroads, and far cheaper than trucking. Monongahela or "falling banks," was the native American name for one such river, and we have built a series of manmade structures intended to keep it navigable by large vessels. At what is now Pittsburgh, the Mon joins with the Allegheny River to form the Ohio River, which is in turn the largest tributary of the Mississippi. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has posted two parts of a four part series on the locks and dams along nearby rivers.

Locked and Dammed: The region's 23 locks and dams are on the brink of failure

Faced with flat funding, the Corps [of Engineers] has adopted a "fix when fail" approach to maintaining locks and dams.

Take what happened at the Montgomery Dam on the Ohio River near Shippingport in 2006. A week after the Corps concluded that the dam had structural problems, a runaway barge hit it, damaging two of 10 100-foot-wide steel gates used to control the flow of water.

"Since that time, we've only had enough funds to put Band-Aids on the gates," said the Corps' Mr. Fisher. "We are at the border of 'fix when fail' and 'failing to fix.' "

The second part looks at one overbudget project:

Locked and Dammed: Ohio River project decades late, billions over

Since 1993, the Corps has been trying to build locks and a 2,500-foot dam across the Ohio River at Olmsted, Ill., about 20 miles upriver from where the waterway joins the Mississippi River. When the project was authorized in 1988, the estimated cost was $775 million and the Corps expected to complete it by 2000.

Nearly two decades later, the Corps has spent double the original estimate and the work is only 40 percent complete. Officials estimate it will take another $1.6 billion to complete by 2024 -- 24 years later than expected.

The latest price tag on the project, $3.1 billion, added $1 billion to an estimate made just a year ago. The news, delivered at congressional budget hearings this month, stunned industry officials even though they had learned last summer that another hefty price hike was in the works.

A lot has been written about the rise in prices due to speculation that there may be a conflict between Israel and Iran. I wonder if there is any speculation that the Monongahela may be shutdown by a failed lock or dam.