It’s Infrastructure Week! Again. (And Again.)

By David Scott, Managing Member at Avid Communications

Approximately two years ago, the city’s public works department and various utilities and their subcontractors began upgrading the infrastructure that lies underneath the Southwest Boulevard in front of our offices. And recently they concluded that effort. (We think. We hope. We pray.)

But we’ve been duped before, thinking the various backhoes, jackhammers and big trucks had moved further southwest, only to have the orange cones invade us once again. But for the moment, “All is Quiet on the (South)Western Front.”

During the project, we learned the following:

The windows in our building are exceedingly thin.

Our building was built in the ‘60s when nobody cared about energy efficiency, and the windows apparently have the quality of actually magnifying sound waves as they pass through on their way to the core of your brain.

There is no limit to the number of times the same hole can be opened and closed.

Marine Corps basic training supposedly features the drill of digging a hole and filling it right back in – over and over. Well, surely these crews are composed of Marines. We’re not sure what lies under that street… apparently more than water, sewer, gas, electrical and fiber pipes and connections. And all of it needed replacing, one utility at a time.

Construction equipment spends most of its time backing up.

The loud beeping when in reverse was successful in preventing any small children from being crushed. But the incessant beeping did cause a number of people working in the vicinity to go insane.

On a positive note…

Not everything was an annoyance. The cone crews were thoughtful enough to change the traffic pattern almost every day, so our people were treated to the comedy of watching motorists navigate the obstacle course. There were no head-on collisions, but plenty of people got flipped off. And betting pools formed to see how many days would pass before a freshly filled hole would be opened again.

We’re waiting for the final chapter. The current state of the pavement, as you might guess, is terrible, so we’re expecting the street to be repaved soon (and by that we mean sometime in the ‘20s). Then, inevitably, the Water Department will dig new holes in the street within a week or two.