Sinking feeling
Thursday August 23rd 2018, 9:49 pm
Filed under: Family,Life

There’s some construction going on next to my husband’s commute with a lot of digging and we found ourselves going over a set of steel plates set on the road across from all that. Well, okay, there’s a utility-undergrounding project going on on that road but why the half-mile gap?

The plates were a bit wet last week.

Our water table is high enough that you can’t build basements, and I figured it was just displaced water from the construction work. Although, this was at a high enough elevation that it surprised me that it would happen there.

Then there was standing water.

Then there was an actual, splashing puddle this week, and he was Not Happy about driving over those plates and wondered why the city hadn’t gotten on this pronto.

The things you learn after being married 38 years….

Turns out that when he was a teen, growing up in a house that was about halfway down a steep hill, there was a water leak next to the road at the bottom there. A crew came out to try to patch it but they couldn’t find the source and while they looked, the amount steadily increased. Not good. They had the road blocked off to traffic, but finally had to ask the neighbors to move their cars off the street altogether so they could test further up.

So Richard U-turned the family cars and got them out of the way–this after having run various errands and having parked in front of the house a few times.

The guy jammed some kind of pole through the roadway to test what was underneath.

There was no longer anything underneath. Where my in-laws’ cars had just been, there was nothing but a huge cavernous sinkhole below the roadbed starting at the upper edge of their property, going the width of the street, about twelve feet deep, and thirty or forty feet long and he got to see just exactly how close he’d just come.

He definitely did not want to be driving over those steel plates.

Yesterday and today there were men standing in the hole he’d been sure was being created there. The men’s heads in that pit were at street level and it took up two and a half lanes of traffic (no bike lane for you!) with several flag men to keep people from driving into the abyss or each other as westbound diverted into eastbound.

A little water is like a little kindness: it can quietly move that stubborn mountain out of the way all by its little self.


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WOW!

Comment by Sherry in Idaho 08.25.18 @ 9:59 am



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