At about 7 pm last Tuesday evening I entered the market place in Preuilly to discover a group of concerned neighbours leaning over a barrier and peering into a large hole in the pavement. The man from Véolia, the water company, was there with his van too. He was phlegmatically munching on a sandwich -- an act of desperation by a French man who can see he is going to miss his dinner.
The pavement had been noticeably sinking for over a week, and according to Catherine, who lives in the house next to collapse, it just suddenly crashed into the void underneath, making a huge racket and breaking the town water pipe, which was still spraying water everywhere. It may have been leaking before too, but more likely is that the recent heavy rain was the last straw. Catherine thinks the pipe which runs under the pavement to connect her house's downpipe to an outlet in the gutter has probably been blocked and leaking. It is an inadequate looking rectangular profile and it wouldn't take much to block it up. Luckily there doesn't seem to be any water seeping in to Catherine's cellar.
This has been a problem point for years, with a big leak under the pavement some years ago that emptied the town water tower (Fr. chateau d'eau), which contains four hundred cubic metres (so less than the swimming pool, which contains a couple of thousand cubic metres) of water.
Luckily there was no one walking on that section of pavement when it collapsed.
1 comment:
Where did the dirt go?
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