The cost of the new intersection at Food Lion was over $2 million, yet it appears the VDOT engineers were never taught how to manage water flow. Almost any civil engineer, and anyone with any rational sense knows that water flows from high areas to low. When designing any type of roadway, the grade is how you handle the movement of water from one place to another. At the entrance to the Food Lion shopping center, water continually pools up because it is all flowing into one distinct area (as it has for years).
For a $2 million dollar price tag to ‘improve’ that intersection, you would think that a basic correction would have been made. Apparently not. The following images were taken by Marita Patterson.
Paul Plante says
See, this just goes to show that you don’t really understand the “science” of real-world engineering, which isn’t to solve problems, which is very bad for future job security.
Rather, it is to create new problems that will then require an extensive study of the problem, and then generate some reports on possible solutions to the problem that was created.
That creates job security.
What is obviously needed here now is a massive pumping system to be built to take that water and send it elsewhere, since now it can be easily determined where the pumping system will actually be needed, which is where the water is.
See, that is an essential element of the design process – if you are going to deal with water, you have to know where it is now, not where it was last week or last month, and now, thanks to the Cape Charles Mirror, they can begin the process of designing the massive pumping system since a picture of where water is is worth a thousand word engineering report trying to describe where the water is.
Probably another million could do the trick, assuming there isn’t something lurking there underground that itself would require an engineering study to resolve before the pumping system can actually be built.
Scotiagirl says
Scotiagirl suggests a scaled down but architecturally correct version of the CBBT
Bob says
This is just more of VDOT s way of keeping water from entering the Chesapeake Bay as they have and continue to do through out this area. They refuse to open up drain culverts saying (Road contamination )causing road and property flooding which then causes land erosion to where ? The Chesapeake Bay . This then causes areas like Deep Creek to fill up with that soil which in turn causes the water table to raise . This causes more flooding. Dredging the soil back onto the areas it came from has not happened. Why ? They say they cannot put that soil back there it has to be burned first . What? Other areas in the US also on low lying areas burm up areas and dredge as well as keep Road culverts open .
Bailey Ronnie says
Vdot has been trying to drain water up hill my whole life
Stuart Bell says
I see yellow trucks parked all over the place, doing nothing. Look at the path they beat from their offices/garage to the Shore Stop. It used to look like a deer path in the woods.
Paul Plante says
And one day, they are sure that they will finally succeed – just a matter of re-arranging gravity in the right manner.