On the same day, I believe, DPW began repair work on a sinkhole underneath the 400 block State Street just east of Carroll. Sinkholes are typically formed by water leaking from a broken pipe that has eroded the fill supporting a street. A DPW employee told me that the tiny opening in the street they had come across accepted 8 feet of a pole.
Here is a picture of the original hole that DPW patched (to come back to later), taken nearly three weeks ago. Notice the cracks. Notice their fresh patch is on top of an old patch. DPW probably missed an opportunity months or years ago to fix the problem below, instead just patching over it without investigating the cause of the sunken area that may have had a hole. (HUDseen hopes to post a piece soon about the condition of the 400 block of State Street which was repaved by Colarusso in the fall of 2017, just 7 years ago. It is a mess, made worse by DPW's recent excavation.)
Here is the hole that DPW dug a few days ago to get at the problem at least 8 feet below the surface of the street (a street that sees a fair share of tractor trailers that have veered off of the truck route as well as all sorts of other heavy vehicles). Doing excavation and pipe repair work in the winter really sucks for DPW employees, but it is also not the best time to be fixing things that we want to last for decades. We -- Americans, really -- created a hidden infrastructure nightmare. It worked for a while, but no longer. None of this is surprising, because the infrastructure below our streets was not meant to last forever. Build it, hope it lasts for a long while, have someone else deal with it when it fails, and have them pay to replace it. If they can. We have no choice but to continue pouring money into fixing everything that fails below our streets.
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| Dig, dig, dig! Repair, repair, repair! Fill, fill, fill! All this money and effort for possibly just a slight crack in a pipe that occurred years ago. |
DPW became aware of the sinkhole sometime around December 20th, but snow diverted their attention to it. As of yesterday, the cones were still blocking the eastbound lane of State (see lead picture).
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| Not Green Street |
About ten days ago, DPW responded to the aforementioned busted water main on Green Street. The cones are still there, and while the pipe may have been repaired, the hole in the recently repaved street has not been covered with asphalt yet. The announcement regarding this break is no longer found on the city's website.
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| Green Street |
The salt we put on our streets to clear them of snow and ice to make them safe for drivers is damaging and expensive in so many ways. One issue that is often forgotten about is the salty water that gets below our streets, either through cracks and holes in the street or straight into sewer pipes through storm drains. And we all know that salt is not metal's friend. Actually, metal despises and fears salt. Salt is a metal killer. And while many water pipes are now made of PVC plastic, I can't imagine that salt is plastic's friend either, and it certainly can't be where plastic pipes are joined with some sort of adhesive. We can't keep going down this road of unsustainability.
How much salt do you suppose DPW has dumped on our streets in the past 5 weeks since we got our first snow in early December? How many pipes below our streets are feeling the damaging effects from all of that salt? How much more damaging salt will DPW spread on our streets in the coming few months? How can we go on like this for much longer? It's not the snow that's killing us; it's all the vehicles we can't live without requiring all this salt that has no place on our streets or sidewalks!
Vehicles, like our water infrastructure, were helpful for a while. But our reliance on them -- and the space, asphalt, salt and fossil fuels they demand -- is now biting us IN THE A$$. Hudson can't progress if we are constantly being forced to tear up our streets, throwing attention, time and money at them constantly.
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