Beyond the potholes
When the rain clears the air and washes away dust and debris, it seems you can see for miles. Not long after what seems a fleeting glimpse of clarity, must we return to the haze, the crud, and our own Hahn-enabling myopia?
The potholes didn’t just appear overnight because of the rain. The cracks and the rubble have been there under the debris, waiting to be noticed, for quite some time. This concept of “waiting to be noticed” is better referred to as “lying in wait.” It is the stuff that underwrites Murphy’s Law and apparently the current Los Angeles city management.
In any stretch of the imagination, if you were to characterize good city management, would it be covered with pockmarks and potholes? I am of the opinion that people, organizations, and companies don’t spontaneously go bad, as if out of the blue, and experience problems. They are ignored, degraded, or mismanaged over time. These problems have been festering on the horizon long before they obstructed our paths or manifested themselves in the morning post.
A system-wide spontaneous degradation of roads indicates that there is no effectively managed preventive maintenance program (PMP). A PMP can be as simple as: schedule, direct, and or contract the replacement of X square units of road such that the entire quantity of roads is replaced within its average usable life. If this were the case, only a small percentage of the city roadway would have fallen into disrepair.
The city-wide occurrence of potholes is an indicator that the Bureau of Street Maintenance may be suffering from system problems. Further, the Mayor’s “You call, we’ll repair” response to the citizens side-steps the system problems and subordinates the entire Bureau to inefficient placating and willy-nilly patch jobs. Again, we need to ask, what kind of outfit are we running here?
The rain taxed the system. The lights went out. Sewers backed up. Hillsides and homes washed away. Silt filled the waterways. Roofs leaked and the potholes appeared. When 17 inches of rain pours out of the sky into the LA basin — lucky to see that much water in a year — we can easily assign blame to natural causes. This mumbo jumbo, of course, is a ploy for circumstance. We might as well be contented with a roof that leaks only when it rains. In the same vein and closer to home, the City Hall roof is fine. The leak is just another rain-associated anomaly.
We spent lots of money building roofs, clearing spillways, paving streets, and paying high city salaries to prevent these anomalies, with a minimum expectation that they function reasonably as intended. They didn’t. The rain cleared away some of the debris, making another area of city oversight very apparent.
The potholes didn’t just appear overnight because of the rain. The cracks and the rubble have been there under the debris, waiting to be noticed, for quite some time. This concept of “waiting to be noticed” is better referred to as “lying in wait.” It is the stuff that underwrites Murphy’s Law and apparently the current Los Angeles city management.
In any stretch of the imagination, if you were to characterize good city management, would it be covered with pockmarks and potholes? I am of the opinion that people, organizations, and companies don’t spontaneously go bad, as if out of the blue, and experience problems. They are ignored, degraded, or mismanaged over time. These problems have been festering on the horizon long before they obstructed our paths or manifested themselves in the morning post.
A system-wide spontaneous degradation of roads indicates that there is no effectively managed preventive maintenance program (PMP). A PMP can be as simple as: schedule, direct, and or contract the replacement of X square units of road such that the entire quantity of roads is replaced within its average usable life. If this were the case, only a small percentage of the city roadway would have fallen into disrepair.
The city-wide occurrence of potholes is an indicator that the Bureau of Street Maintenance may be suffering from system problems. Further, the Mayor’s “You call, we’ll repair” response to the citizens side-steps the system problems and subordinates the entire Bureau to inefficient placating and willy-nilly patch jobs. Again, we need to ask, what kind of outfit are we running here?
The rain taxed the system. The lights went out. Sewers backed up. Hillsides and homes washed away. Silt filled the waterways. Roofs leaked and the potholes appeared. When 17 inches of rain pours out of the sky into the LA basin — lucky to see that much water in a year — we can easily assign blame to natural causes. This mumbo jumbo, of course, is a ploy for circumstance. We might as well be contented with a roof that leaks only when it rains. In the same vein and closer to home, the City Hall roof is fine. The leak is just another rain-associated anomaly.
We spent lots of money building roofs, clearing spillways, paving streets, and paying high city salaries to prevent these anomalies, with a minimum expectation that they function reasonably as intended. They didn’t. The rain cleared away some of the debris, making another area of city oversight very apparent.
posted by The Gadfly at 5:00 AM
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