Cone In The Road! One More Try!

First on this week's list of Friday Features (FF) is the orange cone that has returned over the longtime ugly and dangerous storm drain situation on Carroll Street.  The cone first appeared early last week over the drain with the damaged and missing surrounding asphalt a few days after the first appearance of Friday Features two weeks ago.  Is it possible someone at City Hall reads HUDseen?  Alas, within a day or two someone had moved the cone to the sidewalk, but now it is back in the street where it should have been 3, 6 or 9 months ago when the damage surrounding the drain first became problematic and obvious.

DPW was out earlier this week filling potholes and cracks in our streets (at least on 2nd Street), but they had no time to tend to the mess on Carroll Street.  However, they did patch their sinkhole repair project adjacent to a storm drain at Warren & City Hall Place that I informed the city of on Friday, June 28th.  It looks like they did a subpar job of asphalting and I guarantee it will start to come apart soon.

No asphalt, while ...

The DPW pothole crew was apparently unable or unwilling to fill the nasty pothole on the very busy Prospect Avenue that is an annoyance for any driver and very dangerous for any bicyclist.   I say unwilling because I informed both Robert Perry and his DPW foreman of that hole 3 or 4 weeks ago via email.  Yesterday, DPW was at that intersection putting the final touches around a sewer drain repair project, using asphalt and a steam roller that an employee drove to the top of Columbia and back down.  It seems they ran out of asphalt to fill the pothole 80 feet away that has been obvious for months.  or they don't give a crap about craters on Prospect Avenue ready to put a cyclist on his or her chin or underneath a vehicle passing one or two feet away.

...80 feet away, fresh asphalt

Further south on Prospect is a good amount of missing asphalt surrounding a sewer manhole cover that is such a joy to drive over. That cover is found among the rapidly disappearing crosswalk lines that were installed last October at the cost of around $500. With the DPW Superintendent's house about 80 feet away from that lovely scenery, apparently none of this bothers him enough to do anything about it.

This didn't happen overnight!

There is still a loose and at times very noisy manhole cover at the busy intersection of 6th & State, as well as an unsecured and noisy water valve cap 12 feet away. Those two things have not been attended to since September. Yesterday afternoon, a truck of some sort hit the manhole cover and it made the loudest noise I have heard it make yet. It was obscene. For at least the twentieth time in the past 9 months, today I once again reminded the mayor of the time he called these two noisy issues "nuisances" when I met him at the corner last fall. This morning, for the first time, Kamal greeted me as "Satan." I must be doing something right! He used to amuse himself by referring to me as William. What a child he is.

The sinkhole adjacent to a drain on Allen Street that DPW covered up last week in preparation of excavation has not been touched since.  Actually,  there is a bit more paint on the street there since HUDseen reported on it in last week's FF.  Perhaps that is someone's way of reminding DPW to not forget about what they started.

More spray paint, but nothing else.

Then there is this damaged section of concrete surrounding a double storm drain on Warren at 2nd Street.  The concrete is a replacement of asphalt from who knows how many years ago.  It's ugly and dangerous for pedestrians.  HUDseen will keep an eye on this one.

I feel the need to include a picture from Wednesday's terrific downpour only because it might be a cautionary tale about the common theme of Friday Features.  Runoff streaming down the Columbia Street hill along CMH was trying its best to drop into the drain in front of 747 Columbia while runoff from the other direction made its way to the drain as well, creating a nice whirlpool effect.  At first it was amusing, then it was kind of scary as the water quickly covered the entire sidewalk then began nipping at the base of the free fridge in front of Deb's.  That drain simply could not handle that amount of water quickly enough.  It was one effect of our climate change issue in plain sight.  

We got at least one inch of water in less than an hour.  A small town in southern Illinois recently got 6 inches of rain in 5 hours and their dam was ready to burst.  If Hudson gets one of those so-called "once in a lifetime" storms, we are in for some fun.  Even now, our drains, pipes and the asphalt protecting them are being asked to handle more rainwater than they ever have been expected to handle.  More use means more wear and tear means more damage means more DPW work.... and so on.  What the hell else can't DPW do that is just as, or more, important than filling a simple pothole on Prospect Avenue or fixing asphalt damage around a sewer cover or drain?  This should be the easy stuff, right?

And that's it for this week's Friday Features.  Have a great weekend.