Gray Skies Are Going To Clear Up...

A few days ago I was watching the workmen construct a house a block away from our second floor bedroom doorway.  Although it was overcast and foggy, there they were, working away.  The next day they were again at their task in the cold weather - 45F degrees is cold for San Miguel, even in the winter.  The fog was just lifting from around the spiffy homes on the rise to the west.

True to the usual here, by one o'clock each day the overcast had cleared, the sun was out, and it was rather warm (some may say 'hot').  They followed the usual weather pattern; just a bit colder at the beginning of the day.

Friday night it poured down.  I'm told that there was some terrific thunder and lightning (slept through that), but while watching the television in the middle of the night I witnessed a spate of rain that became quite heavy at times - and then moved on.

As expected, our street suffered.  We live on a modest hill that runs past our house, so rainstorms wash the hillside down to the bottom of the hill, where the street meets up with the road from Celaya.  Unfortunately, the Celaya road is on a higher elevation.  So the city had graciously installed a large drain where our street must change elevation in order to join the Celaya highway.  However, because everything gets washed down the street to the drain, it sometimes clogs up.  And it's been doing this for years....

Enter the city's road department which installs a supplemental drain that diverts the overflow through piping at the lower level which comes out a ways down the Celaya road and dumps the excess water there.  Of course that work eliminates the sidewalk up to the highway level, so they built a stepped rampway.  This is an improvement to the dirt path that has existed - for years - since the original sidewalk disappeared.

Now, there are problems with the location of the discharge of that pipe (it's in the parking area of our local gym and members drive around and through it), but their answer to that (some concrete over the discharge pipe and some vertical pipes to prevent cars from driving directly over it) are miscalculated.  It wasn't long (the first day) until a vehicle drove over the concrete panels and destroyed them.  And after this big rain, the part of the dirt parking lot that was dug up (by shovel and pickax) so they could run the piping was a muddy mess.  At least the dirt previous to their work had been hard-packed.

So life goes on.  I'm sure the gym is not happy with their work or placement of the discharge area, but if it was placed further down the road it would interfere with the parking for delivery trucks to our supermarket.  I suppose folks will eventually get used to it....