Quit Complaining About the Construction

I was having lunch in Library Mall with some folks a few weeks ago when one of my companions noted all the construction going on around campus. An area by the mall's fountain was torn up, East Campus Mall was being assembled along with the Chazen addition, Park Street, etc. Headaches for drivers and a blight on lovely pedestrian areas. He was not amused by it all. But what irritated me was his mocking tone. It was as if the construction crews were incompetent and it had all been done just to piss him off.

It's a catch-22 for the city and university, as I tried to explain to my interlocutor. Yes, it's a pain and unsightly but construction is necessary. Some of the areas were torn up for the East Campus Utility Project. Remember those? Utilities? There are things like fiber optic cables underneath the ground. Without those, you won't be able to get to your Facebook page quickly enough to bitch about all the construction to your friends.

I think about this as well when I read stupid comments about the Willy St Coop adding a rear driveway in the face of the Willy Street being torn up next spring. You have loony toons such as Ted Voth who say things like, "That Willy's gonna be torn up, and threaten all the small businesses on the street is an artifact of 'America's love affair with the automobile.'" Think about it. What else lurks under the street? That rain water has to go somewhere or the basements of all those $300,000 homes get flooded. And where do people like Voth think all that precious drinking water that flows from our taps comes from?

America's water infrastructure is as old as dirt and the E.P.A. estimates that it's going to take "$334.8 billion over the next two decades" to get it into shape. There's a Civil War-era water main running into the Capitol in Washington D.C. There are even a handful of water pipes made of wood still in use today.

Here in Madison, it's the same story regarding the work on Park Street: construction workers found a water pipe dating back to 1892:

Construction crews that have been working on the East Campus Utility Project since late May have encountered a setback due to numerous unforeseen conflicts with underground utility pipes that have been in that area for a very long time.

"They were not expected to be there," says Rob Kennedy of Facilities Planning and Management, referring to the older pipes. "Some of the university's pipes are so old that we don't have accurate plans or mapping to indicate where they are."

Kennedy also notes that the construction crews are digging near an 1892 water main that bursts easily if it is uncovered.

So, if you want to bitch about construction, find someone else. Perhaps instead of complaining about all the construction, you can be thankful that amenities of modern life like potable water coming from a faucet in your home are being maintained a little bit so that we're not getting water from the same pipes that Bob La Follette, Sr. did. Do you want sinkholes or a temporary inconvenience? Either way it's bitch, bitch, bitch.