A real cutup in Somerville
By adamg - Fri, 06/13/2008 - 8:57am.
Rob Bellinger took this photo out his apartment window and reports:
Remember the city sidewalk job outside my apartment that took five months to complete last year? Last Friday at 7:30am, this guy showed up with a giant concrete saw and cut a lot of it up.
Must be the season
I was working at home on Tuesday (the AC was on the fritz at work, couldn't bear it anymore) and heard a bit of a racket outside. Shortly, one of Boston's Finest knocked on my door and kindly advised me it would be in my interests to put my MINI in my driveway, because though he was doing his best directing traffic around the construction, some of the cars were coming pretty close to mine. I know from experience that even a collision that is entirely the other guy's fault will cost you money (they call it betterment!), so I readily complied.
We had the usual conversation about how much he liked my car (MINI drivers will verify this is a daily occurrence) and how expensive gas was, and I asked him just what they were doing out there. The cop said, "I have no idea what they're doing. They just did this a few months ago."
What they were doing was digging up the blacktop around a small rectangular metal plate in the road - sewer or electric related, I guess. The funny thing was that this had been dug up a few months ago, and patched just perfectly. Yet they were digging it up again - not to do any work on the infrstructure, but just to fill it right back in again. So over the next couple of hours there was a great hubbub of hammering and pouring and tamping going on out there, and by evening it again looked exactly as it had that morning.
I wonder if Boston has decided to provide traffic calming through perpetual pointless construction?
Same thing here
My street has the same thing. With about a day notice, they came through and started tearing up patches of the street and repaving them the same day. They actually first spent a day jack hammering an outline of the patches and then came back again virtually unannounced the next week to tear and repave.
Permanent versus Temporary patch
They may have done an unusually good job the first time, but a permanent patch is required. There are actual requirements for the fill under neath, hot mix, etc.
My dad ruffled some contractor and utility feathers in Oregon when he compiled data on pavement failures for the DOT and found a high incidence of "temporary" patching leading to those failures. In other words, the utilities were throwing in cold mix and never returning to install the legally required restoration, and the entire road segment would eventually have to be ground and paved as a result of the bad patches - at state expense, of course!
Once contract payments got tied to inspection or sign off records on the permanent fixes, this meant more permanent restorations and fewer failures. He got an award for saving the state a lot of money as the DOT tracked the results of the intervention (even after he moved on to "winter maintenance").
Sounds like the Boston Water and Sewer Commission in action
Whenever they tear up a sidewalk, at least out here in the boonies, they replace the concrete with a poorly leveled blob of asphalt that just sits there for years, no matter how often you complain, until the DPW redoes all the sidewalks on the street as part of its general maintenance efforts.
On my street they repaved
On my street they repaved the street for the first time in like 20 years (I live on an extreme sidestreet) and they even gave us brand new crosswalks made out of brick (as part of a mitigation with a new developer.) So we had these great new streets and awesome crosswalks that were just so nice looking.
2 weeks later the gas company (or someone like them) shows up and cuts a line all the way down the street (presumably to get to the pipes/lines) across the cross walks and down the street. When they were done they put temporary asphalt down. So now we have this brand new street with a straight black line running down it, it doesnt look that bad on the street portion but this new brick crosswalk has a black line running through it :( Its been like that for a year now...
The same thing going on my
The same thing going on my street, Last year they redid the street, Perfect job. the Street now looks like swiss cheese. I watched them all day. they did nothing, just dug holes took lunch and filled them right back in. I did notice These subcontractors where from Hyde Park. Hmm I find that interesting And smells of Tom Meninos cronies. I think they are insuring future work for themselves. the patchs will fail and they will be back. Its like the glass company that sent out punks to smash windows and the idiots left biz cards behind.