Fun with Old Infrastructure
Fun with Old Infrastructure
It looks like I need to amend the first line of my February advisory…the city also has to keep the gas main from cracking, especially those that run below the street in front of your house/apartment. Unfortunately, this happened on February 20th and it was quite a fun night. If you want more information about the leak, visit the University of Chicago’s newspaper article.
As for me, I had noticed some commotion and fire engine noise in front of our apartment at around 3pm. I also noticed that traffic was being diverted from the street, so I figured something was going on in or around that section of the street. However, I didn’t stand around and watch as I figure they didn’t need more spectators and that if it affects me, I will know about it without being right there. So I went back up to the apartment.
At around 5pm, Shareena walks into the apartment and tells me that we have to evacuate. In fact, they were not going to allow her to come up to the apartment since they had already evacuated the place. For some reason, I was not notified of this and had remained in the apartment. Soon thereafter, we put our cats into their travel pet carriers and went downstairs to the lobby. Here we waited awhile with others waiting for some definitive word on the progress of the work being done on the gas line. After awhile, I decided to head over to Noodles, Etc. to get some dinner so we wouldn’t starve ourselves all night. When I returned, we got more information about how they are not expecting to complete the task until midnight, so we headed over to Shareena’s supervisor’s house a block down the street to spend the night with them.
So all in all, it was really more of an inconvenience than anything else. Of course, carrying Atticus for a block was not an easy task. Hopefully, the other infrastructure around our apartment decides to stay in tack for a few months longer (things around here do look quite old and the cracked gas line was around 50 years old itself) and we won’t have to do something similar when Shareena has an essay or her thesis due. Hey, at least I have my laptop…but carrying her books around would be a killer.
