These dirt piles with orange cones are all over our street and the next street over, effectively making our one lane street a half lane street. I had some fun getting out of the neighborhood to get to the feed store. It was quite the obstacle course with the dirt piles and the trash bins all over the roads.

No idea what these are, who did them, or when they appeared. I have to guess they were dug up after the trash trucks came through, because there’d be no way for the trash truck to get down our street without running over them. I had trouble getting by some of them, and my truck isn’t exactly huge — not trash truck huge, anyway.

I knew something was up on our street a few weeks ago when I noticed the spray-painted markers left behind by the people that must be called before digging to show where all the underground utility pipes and lines are hidden. Those appeared a few days after they blocked off our whole street for a few hours and Rose Lady had a city crew digging around in her front yard for some unknown reason.

I wish I knew what was going on, because I suspect they are looking for a gas main leak. The only utilities buried on our street are gas and water, and water leaks are somewhat more noticeable, seeing as there is usually water, mud, or changes in the ground level caused by the drenched soil settling. A underground gas leak is more difficult to discern. If it isn’t an especially bad one, it won’t cause any smells. In fact, the only sign could be dying vegetation. We learned that when there was that bad gas leak on my mom’s street, but they didn’t dig up holes all along her street to find it either. They just drilled little holes everywhere. I’d hope Austin’s means to find such things were at least up to the standards on my tiny hometown, but who knows. Maybe in Austin they dig big holes in streets to look for gas leaks instead of drilling little ones.

And would it kill the city to let us know they are going to be doing something on our street? They wouldn’t even have to go door-to-door. A simple sign or two saying they’d be digging and how long they expect things to be messy would be nice. I suspect this is only the mere beginning of the mess, and we’ll never know what’s going on unless one of us grabs the first city worker we see and asks.

Anyway, I’d like to know what’s going on and how long it’s going to be going on and when the hell the dirt piles will be gone. Our street is narrow enough as it is, thank you very much, and it’d be grand if these things weren’t out there causing the drivers in my neighborhood added grief for months on end. The city has torn stuff up on our street before and left it a mess for months on end, and it didn’t make any of us terribly happy. I don’t imagine it will take months for us to all start complaining this time. I know it won’t take me that long. The dirt pile in the photo is directly across the street from the end of my driveway making getting out of my driveway more challenging than it needs to be.