Things I've Been Reading #2
Before going into links, a personal announcement. I will be moving to Boston on Monday. If anyone lives there and has a spare mattress, I would be keenly interested in buying it. If you do not have a mattress, but would simply like to chat, I am game. DM me on twitter!
The Chicago Flood: At this point I expect most everyone has heard of the great floods of unusual things – the Boston Molasses Flood and the London Beer Flood and so on. This was a flood of the usual stuff, but unusual insofar as it did not reach the surface at all. The pilings on which a bridge was built needed to be replaced entirely. When workers drilled holes they hit an old tunnel which everyone had forgotten about. Back in the very early 1900s the Illinois Telephone and Telegraph company dug a bunch of tunnels to haul freight from one part of the loop to another. They didn’t tell anyone about this first – it was only after a few years that the city learned that there was a network of tunnels being dug. Ever since then, no party has wanted to be in charge of maintaining the tunnels, especially once they became unprofitable in the 1950s.
The damage was first discovered by cable TV workers in January. It was still jammed up and only a trickle of water was coming through. The city was unconcerned, and solicited bids for plugging it. The bids came in too high, so they decided to do another round of bids. Too late. The flood started in April.
There are a lot of tunnels in Chicago, including the pedestrian walkways. These flooded. Workers figured out the source of the water when they found live fish in the water. This was no water main break! The damages ran into the billions. It took three days to plug the hole, and it took well over a week to pump all the water out again.
Mayor Daley found a scapegoat in the transportation commissioner, and fired him. This whole thing made Daley, in spite of the fact that the lack of bureaucratic responsibility was his doing, more popular. It goes to show the one true lesson of Chicago politics: no matter how bad it is, the Chicagoans deserve it.
