Traci and I went to the store yesterday, and it was the first time we’d gone anywhere since the front yard was torn up. I guess we had sort of forgotten about the whole mess while we were gone, because when we pulled back into the driveway, we both just laughed at the mess that the property has turned into. It is so damned ugly.
While I was on my lunch break yesterday, I noticed a Price City employee just sort of milling around the front yard and taking notes in a small notebook. I went outside to see what he was doing, and he said he was with the “trees and parkway” department or some such thing, and that he was just surveying any possible damage to the tree roots that could cause the trees to die. I thought that was pretty funny, seeing as how we’ve called the city on a few occasions to get them to trim dead branches off the trees, and they haven’t even done it once. In fact, when the tree in my back yard caused the power line to short out and caught fire to some weeds two years ago, they said they’d send somebody out to trim the tree. Well, they finally sent somebody to trim it just a couple of months ago–luckily for me, they just cut the damned thing down.
Questar was out here yesterday as well, to repair the unmarked gas line that the backhoe struck on Tuesday. When they first showed up, I thought they were worried about the place where the gas main got nicked, but there was actually damage to the line running from the main to my neighbor’s house that they had to repair. It was a little unnerving, since they were working only 20 feet away from my house, and the guy down in the hole was wearing a fire-proof suit, an oxygen mask, and he had a tether attached to his harness so he could be yanked out of the hole by one of the other workers in case something happened. On top of all that, he was welding the new line together, and I don’t believe they shut the gas main off, because my furnace was still running the entire time. There must have been a shut-off valve between the main and the section of pipe they were replacing, but I didn’t see one when the line was exposed the other day.
In the street where they buried the trench, they filled it in mostly with 2-inch rock, and the last foot or two was filled in with road-base gravel, whereas it was all dirt before they dug the trench. Now, whenever a car drives over the filled-in trench, it shakes the entire house. It’s way worse when a large truck or school bus drives over it–the windows and doors shake, and the tremor can be felt anywhere in the house. I hope they pave it back over pretty soon, because I’m getting worried that all this shaking is going to damage the house’s foundation, or even worse, damage the new sewer line (which is currently the envy of the neighborhood :).