Trees topple, poles plunge, roads turn into rivers
Firefighters, police officers and public-works and Eversource crews earned their pay today as a never ending flood of reports came in about downed trees and utility poles, power outages and flooded roads. Here are some of the reports reported to Boston 311 today:
On a number of streets trees came down on the road. One house on Whitcomb Avenue in Jamaica Plain was not so lucky:
Water under the bridge at Archdale Road in Roslindale:
More water under the bridge, this time under the commuter-rail bridge at Quincy Street in Dorchester:
Lake Street in Brighton lived up to its name:
Where'd the sidewalk go? Belgrade Avenue in Roslindale:
Another missing sidewalk, this time on Harvard Avenue in Allston:
Knocked down, but not out, at Columbia Road and Old Harbor Street in South Boston:
Tree down on Aguadilla Street in the South End:
Tree down on Mendelssohn Street in Roslindale:
Nobody was going down Leroy Street in Dorchester for awhile:
Tree down at Carlton and Yarmouth streets in the South End:
Flooded Oak Square Avenue in Brighton:
Tree down on Dana Avenue in Hyde Park:
Tree down on the Norfolk Avenue side of Clifford Playground in Roxbury:
Serious flooding in front of the Star Market on Spring Street in West Roxbury. Oh, wait, that's the Morrissey Boulevard of Westie: That spot always floods.
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Comments
Not the city's responsibility
Not the city's responsibility
Underground flooding
Sorry you got flooded out of your culvert again.
sigh
All the wrong people lost electricity
So who do you think is
So who do you think is responsible for removing fallen trees for city streets and public playgrounds?
And why shouldn't people tell the city about flooded streets? Part of the point of 311 is so the 911 operators can handle actual emergency calls, and so the rest of us can call an easy-to-remember number that will pass the calls on to the appropriate department.
Maybe someone will have to mark some of those calls as "closed, the flood ebbed after the storm." How is this a problem?
Correction
That bridge over Quincy Street is for the commuter rail, not the Red Line. Stay safe and dry everyone.
Fixed
Thanks!
Can Boston finally put
Can Boston finally put electrical wires underground in ALL neighborhoods not just the downtown ones like the more advanced countries do in Europe.
$1M+ A Mile
Call the DPU and see if they and Eversource get back to you.
Also, if they do put them underground, bike lanes will have to be ripped up for months on end. We can't have that.
It should be made a priority
There should be a standing rule that if a street is being heavily resurfaced, the utilities should be buried before they do it. Classic example of where they DIDN'T do this is Bridge Street in Dedham. They took that street down to just crushed stone and spent about 2 years doing a complete overhaul (and addition of bike lanes) and yet the street is still lined with power poles.
Bikes bikes bikes
Spinning in your head.
Maybe get on one sometime?
Nostalgic fixations and repetitive paranoid ruminations are a sign of dementia, which can be delayed by regular physical exercise.
Bike lanes get torn up all the time for construction - nothing new there. But the answer below about coordinating this with street surfacing is the right answer. This could also be part of the necessary digging for the stormwater system reconfiguration - even if that doesn't make you feel the barest glimmer amid the entrenched vascular damage.
BWSC
Has know for years that it’s storm drains cannot handle large rain events and with weather getting worse, today is the time to start doing do something about it.
Decades in the making
Decades in the fixing. Reconfiguring a system built over the course of two centuries takes time and a lot of money.
Boston has been working on this for over a decade, but they are only now settling funding for a full scale rework of the system. Here's some information on what is going on:
https://www.bwsc.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/BWSC_FAQs_V.06.26.23.pdf
https://www.bwsc.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/BWSC%20Stormwater%20Rel...