To the editor:
Try to imagine a situation where acknowledging a problem and doing everything to make it worse makes any sense.
We are just some of the collateral damage midway down Concord Street in the dispute between state and town over clearing the storm drains and sidewalk. Others include the elderly crossing to the Episcopal Church, kids, dog walkers, runners, and anyone else forced to walk in the street because the sidewalk is piled with snow and ice, packed to the density of concrete.
This is, of course, a highway—busy Route 202 —where tractor-trailers barrel along and ambulances whizz by daily, en route to the hospital. Of course, there’s no shoulder to pull over onto anymore, and the street is getting progressively narrower, so it doesn’t take much imagination to see where we’re headed.
We’ve lived on this street for 12 years. We know this stretch of road intimately — we’ve watched (and cleared) the storm drains for more than a decade. There is now an ongoing argument over maintaining this short, crucial stretch of road and sidewalk — and the upshot is that it’s a mess.
It doesn’t take a civil engineer to know that when drains are covered, they don’t drain. We keep an eye on ours, clearing leaves in the fall, and that prevents flooding. When they’re unobstructed, they work just fine. (Clearly they’re the wrong kind of drain for the volume of water at this low point in the road, but that’s another story.)
For anyone to imagine that not removing the snow will somehow make things better is insanity. The only time the street floods, as it did just before Christmas, is when the storm drains are plowed over — and the state refused to clear them. Orange cones, deep water, and ice are a bad combination when you factor in heavy traffic. And, once again, as soon as the drains were dug out, they did their job.
Meanwhile, as we wait in limbo, this stretch of Concord Street is an accident or lawsuit waiting to happen. This is a basic service: clear the drains, the shoulder, our sidewalks.
Annie Graves
Mel Allen