When it comes to drinking water infrastructure, that systems that clean and transport our water, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the U.S. a grade D. In some parts of rural America, it's clear why.
And apologies to all the civil engineering majors who have been grumbling sitting there, saying, if he wants to cross this river so bad, why doesn't he just build a suspension bridge?
Half of all French construction firms report facing difficulties with recruitment, making it the country's worst-affected sector, and a fifth of German building and civil-engineering companies say they lack skilled workers.
In many ways the region is lagging 20 years behind everywhere else, thinks Penny Marshall, the regional director of the Institution of Civil Engineers in the north-east.
Emily Feenstra, chief policy and external affairs officer for the American Society of Civil Engineers, said more coordination would be needed to ensure that all the money that Congress allocated was spent.
It was Hamilton, the butterfly-collecting son of a civil engineer, who had the crucial insight: that what matters in evolution are not organisms or groups of organisms, but individual genes.
Back above the ground, the Soviet Union engaged in the largest civil engineering project in world history to contain the radiation spewing out into the atmosphere from the reactor.
The bus ride home is another dizzying hymn to civil engineering, looping around an elevated interchange in the clouds. It's just another ordinary day in this thrilling, bewildering megalopolis.