"AustinBoston" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]... <snip>
> What is remarkable is that these roads see more service and a lot less traffic than typical Boston
> roads and are still as bad as they are.
>
> Austin
A few years ago, I attended a lecture by a woman who was studying the growth of Boston and the
location of the original stream beds in the watershed. It seems that in their wisdom, the original
developers first channelized, then completely enclosed many of the streams in the area so they could
build over the streams. Her findings were that along these enclosed streams, the number of empty
lots or crumbling buildings was significantly higher than in the rest of Boston. She found no
difference in socio-economic locations of the properties in question. In other words, the buildings
were falling down whether they were on the rich or poor side of town.
Her explanation was that even though the streams themselves were enclosed and surface slope may have
been redirected away from the streams, the underlying subsurface topography still drove water
towards the original stream beds. This undercut the foundations of the buildings which led to them
falling down.
The same is probably happening to the street you are talking about. Heck, it can even happen on a
small scale. The french drain that carries water from my back yard to the street has been leaking
somewhere in the front yard and has created in a small sinkhole that runs under the edge of our
driveway. I just hope that I can convince the landlord to fix it before the driveway collapses....
-Buck