mopho sinkho

[matthew]

oh what a day.

i wake up this morning, hop in the shower. knock-knock on the door.

"honey the backyard is flooded"

"the water main broke (again)"

i'm thinking ok, no big deal. this has happened three (four?) times already since we bought this place a year ago. whatever, i'm in the hot shower.

eventually i get out of the shower and it's like "damn, that's a bunch of water. whatever. i get in my car and head out to scottsdale city court (photo-radar) and ikea (i'm about to reorganize my kitchen).

i come home, still a bunch of water. ali has called city of phoenix a few times already, they do not seem concerned...

[matthew]

so then, on my way home from picking the little boy up, alison calls and says we have a sinkhole in our backyard. OMG

[matthew]

yeah, the backyard has been wet, but suddenly a hole opened up where i had been hoe-ing a half-hour earlier in an effort to divert water from the dirt to the grass.

[matthew]

i get home. everything is chaotic. alison has called the insurance agent. she has called the city several times. i have called the city. i call my brother, he says call the city manager's office and the mayor's office. i do that.

alison leaves for work finally. i've got a bag by the door with my laptop, backups, meds, oscar's favorite stuffed animals. this sinkhole is big! it's like 6 feet long and 4 feet wide. it's deep! deep enough that we are not feeling safe enough to get close to see how deep it is. very deep!

it is obvious that oscar is not going to nap today. i park him in front of the tv, watching franklin on tivo. i don't know what to do, so i start taking photos of the contents of our house for the insurance claim when it falls into the sinkhole.

[matthew]

i open up each cabinet, each drawer and take photos of all our possessions.

(there's the damn salad spinner! wtf! why is it under the sink i am wondering now!)

[matthew]

don't ask me why i took photos of the cabinet full of shopping bags...

[matthew]

at least i got a photo of all my valuable tools on top of my rollaway cabinet in the laundry room. i couldn't live without them.



(are you getting the impression of my/our organizational skills yet?)

[matthew]

so the calls to the mayor and city manager finally pay off. people start showing up from each utility with cans of upside-down spray paint. underground stuff if being marked out.

city of phx water shows up and says "holy shit that is deep. must be at least 12, 14 feet deep. damn!"

he says it is "distribution's" problem.

they show up right away. they say "damn" and spray some unintelligible shit on the ground with more spray paint and look frustrated that they cannot mark the ground where the water is. (spray paint does not stick to water).

finally at about 4pm a backhoe arrives. finally.













for some reason i seem to have the camera on multiple exposure mode. dunno why.



wow, i zoomed in.



they are digging down to the water-main leak.

[matthew]

that's a normal shovel. (more on that topic later). they stick the shovel in the hole so that A) nobody accidentally falls in the hole and B) so they can stick their ears against it and listen to the sound to see if water is going through...

[matthew]

pumping. mind you i have a 3 year old with me. very exciting stuff.



here is the business end. free water for the lawn, nice, huh?



the lay of the land.



yay for sinkholes!



funny faces!

[matthew]

i know the short guy already. he has been out to our alley twice. he is the newb. everyone makes him get in the wet hole and get all sloppy. we are bro's

[matthew]

i get bold enough for a closer look. yuck.

[matthew]

turns out that sink-hole is not a sink-hole exactly. it's a septic system.



nope, i am corrected. it is a "cess-pool". lovely. apparently the distinction is that cesspools are deeper and do not have leaching fields. yum. that's the old sewer-pipe, btw.

[matthew]

finally, some ABC arrives. i like this guy. he is straightforward and seems to know a bunch about cesspools.

[matthew]

here's my favorite part. what's that on the left?