Sewer Construction Update - It Keeps Getting Worse

The sewer replacement has been going on for five weeks now, yet there has been little obvious progress since my last update. But I have seen some interesting machinery.

This dozer was parked right up next to my neighbor's driveway for a few days. It was a bit difficult for them to back out of their driveway with this monster in their way.

This guy was parked at the base of my driveway one morning with no crew in sight. I couldn't back out while he was parked there, so I was late for work.

And then they ran out of places to park equipment, so they actually parked a dozer in my driveway. I took pictures so the city can't say that I cracked the driveway apron. A previous dozer cracked it, but at least I now have proof of their equipment parked in my driveway and they'll have a hard time denying that the heavy equipment did the damage.

This one is my personal favorite and has been responsible for ripping out my gas line not once, not twice, but three times now.

And then they punctured my water line, leaving a nice muddy pond in front of my house. You should see what my car looks like from driving through this every day.

Last week I was without water for over a day and had to shower at a friend's house before work and I was also without gas for three days. I sent an e-mail to the mayor and the city council and one council member has made it her personal mission to have my complaints addressed. The project supervisor showed up today and was a bit indignent and patronizing and told me that I should have called him instead of bothering the mayor. All he did was offer me excuses and deflected blame to other parties. I kept asking him what he was going to do to ensure they don't hit the gas lines again. He kept blaming the gas company for marking them incorrectly. Well, that may be the excuse after you hit it the first time, but then you know it's there, so why do you keep hitting it? He wouldn't give me a straight answer. He was wasting my time and I had just gotten home after a day trying to return from Houston after a cancelled flight, so I was in no mood for his attitude and his smoke and mirrors. I finally went back in the house and closed the door on him.

On a positive note, I've gotten two personal phone calls from the president of the gas company as follow-up to my late night e-mail to him and a manager in their customer service department has also called me and left me with her direct phone number in case I have any more problems. They apologized for what happened and said they'd look into it and would take the necessary steps to resolve the problem so that it wouldn't happen again. That's the approach the project supervisor should have taken instead of deflecting blame and making excuses.