Clang...clang...clang

[jhetley]

Reverberations of a pile-driver working the new courthouse site, about 3/4 mile away and over a rise of land -- not bad here, but I know it is driving some downtown workers batshit.  Me, the site drives me batshit -- filled land right next to a tidal stream, lies in a flood plain where I have seen six feet of water in a February storm.  With soft clay subgrade, hence the pile-driver for foundations.  And with no on-site parking.

But the city fathers and city mothers were dead set on having the damned thing right downtown, and they had this site lying vacant since Urban Renewal in the 1960s.

Damn right it was vacant.  For a reason.

Your tax dollars at work.

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Boy howdy, that gives me flashbacks to life in Portland: if the yuppies weren't building houses on fifty-year floodplains and then trying to sue everyone in sight when the floodplains were underneath ten feet of water two years in a row, they were building houses on the sides of mountains and then crying about how the rains were washing their houses down the hill. At times, I almost hope that Mount Hood goes from being a dormant volcano to an active one, because I want to listen to the little vermin whine after blowing a few million dollars on built-to-flip villas in areas most likely to catch pyroclastic flows.

That's one of the reasons why I like living in Dallas: with a few big exceptions (our current obsession with building an eight-lane tollway inside the Trinity River levees, for instance), we understand that there's no predicting the weather. I regularly tool along a series of bike trails in the area that parallel local creeks, and the spaces are parks because no rational person is dumb enough to build houses or offices alongside creeks that can rise twenty feet in thirty minutes after one of our gullywasher rainstorms. (We still get a few idiots who try, and they're all told "Good luck on getting the insurance.")

[allaboutm-e.livejournal.com]

Do you think they'll be surprised when it floods / sinks every year, or just the first few?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

The design _allegedly_ raises all important parts above the 100-year flood. With the added expense that entails, which meant they had to cut out space for the DA's office and holding cells and leave them in the _old_ courthouse, a quarter mile away...

And they damned well shouldn't be surprised. I told 'em.