Where’s a hungry carnivore when you need one?
It was an accident waiting to happen — an open sewer and a 15-year-old girl who was texting while she walked.
Alexa Longueira, a high school sophomore, was walking along Victory Boulevard near Travis Avenue on Staten Island Wednesday evening when she felt the earth move and was plunged into smelly darkness.
She said the manhole she fell in to was left open and unattended with no warning signs or orange cones. She said two workers with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection failed to secure the area as they prepared to flush the sewer.
"It was just really gross and it was shocking and scary," she said. "Because of their careless mistake I got hurt."
Funny thing about city streets: things happen on them. People walk around, children run around, things fall on the ground and wait there to trip you, cracks in the sidewalk appear… how on earth are people supposed to navigate them?
Wouldn’t it be cool if we had some kind of sensory organs that we could aim in front of us to get a visual representation of what lay ahead, so we could identify obstacles and avoid them by walking around them? It would be amazing!
If I were designing humans, I’d consider putting them somewhere high up – say, perhaps between the nose and the forehead – to provide for a good view. And may have more than one, to provide depth perception.
Oh, if only such things existed!
(Via Polimom)
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But, but… wouldn’t that be… Intelligent Design? *sputter*
~EdT.
Thank God there’s the “Email ‘n Walk” app for the iPhone, which uses the camera to project what’s in front of you as the background on your phone while you’re walking and sending email.
Rob I tthought you were joking but that app exists!
Sorry for my ignorance but I do not text.
Good grief. I assumed it was a joke, but it’s not.
The earth is doomed.
Well in her (de minimus) defense, not only do “things happen” on city streets, but people get distracted and if someone deliberately creates a hazard, that person needs to try to protect against it. In other words, she’s stupid for texting while walking, but regardless the city may be at fault if in fact it was doing work on the sidewalk and left an open, unmarked and unguarded hazard.
After all, by extension your “things happen” approach could mean that we never need any kind of warnings or protections – no “lanes merge” signs (it happens, watch for it), no stoplights (cross-traffic happens, you’ll have to watch for it), etc. As a society we strike a balance. Thanks to tort lawyers it may not be the most efficient balance, but even in their absence it’d be somewhere above anarchist free-for-all.
Well, obviously it’s not that clear cut open manholes should be marked. However… even an open manhole is pretty easy to spot when you are actually looking where you’re going. What really struck me was the insistent “but why should I have to look?”
Yeah. Just… look where you’re going? I mean, it was a street, not her back yard, right?
Ah, my old home town. Always a pleasure to see it in the news.
In her defense, at least she was walking and not driving at the time.
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