To be absolutely clear: people have died here, on more than on occasion. It's like the whole place was designed to be The Last Water Slide You Ever Ride or something. There is nothing stopping you from falling off of these steps and onto slick rock and sliding all the way to the bottom besides your own balance.
apparently if you jump into it, you'll get sucked to the bottom by a powerful drain that will keep you down there until you drown. this is known because it's happened to people. the city's response has always been "well don't do that."
A warning beforehand: this describes the drowning deaths of three children and an adult.
over a decade before this horrifying death (which, I hear the pool is now kept at 3 feet and is cleaned regularly or debris so hopefully nobody can drown anymore, but I ain't fuckin' testing that), there were other deaths, caused by, guess. no, really, guess what killed people.
did you guess lamp posts? because it was lamp posts.
On March 21, 1991, Larry James Watkins and one other unnamed person were killed by a falling lamp post while just sitting on a bench in the park on a windy day.
Nobody could quite figure out what the failure was that caused this particular lamp post to fall, so they just took out the rest of them and now there are no lamp posts in the Water Gardens.
I already longposted on this in my whirlwind lament about concrete spalling, but: no one who buys a thing from someone else, or India
inherits it (orgwise or handed down) seems to be able to like, grok that there's inherent maintenance you must budget for things. some of this is the people handing it to them not realizing they won't do the research, but a lot of it is just, it's expensive and they didn't realize it would be.
which has led to countless deaths, but it's also why your management company doesn't fix your pipes until they burst, why our bridges are falling apart, why everyone has to do all this paperwork for other parties because they refuse to and there's no other choice.
there's nuance but it doesn't matter, it boils down to taking on a responsibility and then being a terrible pet handler to it and then being annoyed and offloading the item onto someone else, without telling them most of the dysfunction is from your neglect. so it repeats. over and over. I can think of two things THIS WEEK that could apply to, just in terms of Internet Stuff, let alone other contexts.
and yeah, who bears the brunt of this are very rarely the class, let alone race of the people who cause it. because the people in that class know how others there act. they know the guard rails should be there. but they don't think to fight for them.
and they probably can't. bureaucracy's prime directive is to protect the integrity of the bureaucracy.
