The problem at the Derby Greenway is solved!
The 80 something year old man who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s from Eastern Europe and sits on the Greenway Commission has convinced the City Council that it was below the dignity of the City Workers to clean up dog poop that some dog owners did not take care of. On top of that, things like parks just draw families to the town and that means more children in school which means more school taxes, and we don’t need any of that in our town! “Only the Best for Our Town!”(tm)
When draconian fines failed to cause the problem to stop (but nobody was ever caught – perhaps it wasn’t dog poop?), they made it illegal to take your dog to the greenway.
Here is the result.
At about 1 PM, the day after July 4th, you can clearly see there is no poop!
On a topic related to a recent post, the 2 handicapped spots (out of 9 spaces) are available if you wish to visit today and take your motorized wheelchair for a walk.
Man and his pets are no longer considered part of nature. Except when employed by government, man is inherently evil and his very presence upsets the earth goddess. Parks, although man-made, become “natural spaces” once they are completed. Government logic therefore dictates that once a park is created, man as a private citizen should never enter it lest it be despoiled by pet poop, tobacco smoke, wheeled vehicles, or noises from happy children which could disturb the chattering squirrels.
Wandering way off the point of my original post, but probably still interesting….
What you are looking at is a flood control project. In 1955, the Naugatuck river had a big flood when the residue of a hurricane arrived in the state
http://www.thefloodof1955.com/
that has traumatized now 3 generations of people who live here. While some bridges were washed away, a relatively small number of people died (especially given the lack of communications back in the 1950s). The main effect on Derby was it washed away a cemetery along the river and people were traumatized by the seeing bones of their long dead relatives floating toward the ocean.
So in response, the Federal Government funded this horrific flood control system, completely cutting off Derby from the rivers that were why the city was built in the first place. The Greenway mostly just runs along the top of the floodwall, which makes it somewhat isolated.
Last year when Hurricane Irene was a dead hit on the area, for the first time since the thing was built, someone decided the floodgates (which were needed because there are railroad tracks that run into the protected area that are lower than the top of the retaining walls – needed to be closed. My understanding is they were built to close automatically if the water was reaching a dangerous level – but the City folks went out there with trucks and crowbars and forced the gates closed. (the gates are federal government managed and operated).
The water did not get to the level where protected things would be flooded (mostly vacant land since it still is risky for insurance purposes) – but if it had and any one of those gates was not completely closed, the entire purpose of building the thing would have been for nothing. If I were in charge, I would bring in bulldozers and tear out the entire thing, and build an actual park along the river with a fishing dock, swimming area, picnic benches and the like – maybe even let some developer build high rise condominiums with direct access to the river and maybe even a boat dock
But that would attract families and children and pets and maybe even some high tech employers with good paying professional jobs – but that could make school taxes go up, so instead we stay in the death spiral of more and more of the town being drug addicted social services clients and with the youth of the town sleeping in the park and pooping on the greenway.
Here is a broader view of what you’re looking at:
The yellowish shaded area is the area that might be flooded in a worst case scenario. It is mostly vacant land, an abandoned lumber yard and the city’s empty redevelopment zone looking for a tenant (who plans to fill in the area behind the wall to make it out of the flood plane any how. The important parts of downtown are probably 20 feet above any conceivable flooding level.
Route 8 is part of the wall – the three green blobs are where the gates are that have to close. There is a fourth gate a couple miles to North. The river by the red dot is at sea level – it is still close enough to the ocean that there is a tidal flow and the river goes up and down. In the old days, cargo ships would come in and leave when the tide was up and the water was deep (high tide can be as much as 8 feet higher than low tide). North of the red dot is not navigable except maybe by canoe.
The river to the left is the Housatonic (the river that flooded last year) – there is a dam just about where the picture ends that prevents any further vessels (or ocean fish) from navigating.
With the advent of the “poop police”, people using the path began to behave as adversaries – I’m watching your dog in case he poops! I’m gonna call 911 if you don’t clean up that poop, etc…
As a non-dog owner who enjoyed trying to walk there, I viewed dogs as very important to my security. Dogs protect their owners and scare drug dealers from the nearby public housing project. The route is fairly isolated – cell phones are helpful in an emergency, but you could be dead by the time the police can get there – since there is no road, they would have to run on foot to get there to assist you.
No dogs = no sense of security = no people = even less of a sense of security = very popular social focus of the town is now vacant and unused. But no poop!
This is just too weird
http://m.nhregister.com/nhregister/pm_110104/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=znTR61fL&rwthr=0
Four hours later, maybe 50 feet from where I took that picture, a woman was going to kill herself. She might even be the tiny dot in the distance.