so will my story of asking ford to stop working 15 hours a day.
what a mess. we kept hoping things would get better, and things have just continually gotten worse. the clouds of dust have been persistent for the entire summer. we've had so little rain. the neighbors have actually complained about the dust on their cars and homes each day. i've watched families flee from the park when huge dust clouds suddenly overtake the area.
of course - i emailed ford and they said they would use more water and more street sweepers. there are still huge clouds of dust.
there is billowing smoke from welding on any given floor - 5 floors of parking deck are in front of the house now. it's huge and ugly. the mechanical building at the end of the block has been sided - it is huge and light grey - and ugly. every new building is so naked and exposed and ugly. such a shame.
the geese fly over and have no where to stop - there used to be so many of them. but the wetlands are gone and the forest is gone and they honk but don't stay.
we've had rumbling for months. we've had house trembling for months. we have damage for sure. and then, about ten days ago, we were woken up to an incredible roller coaster of shocks through the house. bang! a big digger would smash into the ground on the other side of the ring road and then our house would shake. over and over. it was nauseating. then we started hearing new noises in our basement that we had not heard before. loud knocking - as if someone was outside our basement walls, knocking on them with something dense enough to send sound through cinder blocks.
for the first time ever, carl emailed fordland. he used all caps. he wanted to know what the hell was going on. that was monday, sept 25th. on the morning of tuesday, sept 26th, i received a phone call from a fordland dcampus representative. the poor thing - i felt bad that they made her call me. she said first that she wanted to thank me for emailing about the tree issue (will explain later) and secondly that my email about the new basement noises needed a response. she said it seemed the crew had found an old school foundation in the area they were digging for the new sewer line (8 foot in diameter cement sewer pipes being put in the ground all along the path of the yet to be expanded ring road) and that the old foundation would be removed in the near future so the project of sewer line could be finished.
i broke down in tears. i started telling her about how scary it was to live here through all of this house shaking, about how terrifying it is to be in the house when it happens, about how many months of noise and dirt and lost sleep we have already had and how our walls are cracked and that my family really could not take anymore of this. she apolagised repeatedly, and said hopefully the current disruption would be done in a few days.
found an old school foundation - duh. for bought the land edison school was on in the 80s, and ford knocked the school down, pewabic tile and all, and hauled it all away. much to the dismay of many residents who had gone to school there. of course ford knew it was on their land - they bought the damn thing and ruined it themselves. now they were trying to act all surprised that once upon a time some building had been there. so many lies.
i sat down and emailed fordland, and dcampus, and joe vicari, and the mayor, and james murray (who is in charge of parks, but i was thinking of him and his brother barry as the same person) and i wrote about how months of our lives have been ruined and our house has been damaged and it's been awful to live through this. i mentioned how ford kept saying they would not help with damages and yet our house clearly was suffering, and that i wanted to know what were they going to do to keep my family safe?
the house kept shaking. through last friday - the house kept shaking.
i had a city function on thursday night - part of a series to focus on dearborn as a whole and the people in it who have started their own businesses. i was part of a panel discussion on why i chose dearborn, what it's like to run a biz, and what sorts of things would make our city better to do biz in. before the panel discussion started, barry murray came up to me to ask how i was doing, and to inquire about the construction. he said he had seen my latest email and wanted more information.
WHAT? no one from the city had been willing to discuss this with me before now. shocked, i proceeded to tell him who i was dealing with and how for 9 months i had been told by the dcampus email answering service that no damages would be covered by ford for this project. barry told me one of the guys i had been emailing had actually retired from the project. he asked me if i had been in touch with a certain person (and of course i do not remember the name, nor did i write it down - foolish of me), to which i replied no i did know who that was. he then asked me if ford had brought over monitors to place in my home to monitor any cracks or vibrations, and i said no. i explained to him that tall eric, who had just come from ann arbor at the beginning of the process, had told me that program was available in the very beginning, but that everyone else i spoke with after told me it was not available and i could not have monitors in my house. barry said that was not right. and i agreed.
i was in awe that anyone wanted to talk to me from the city. it was truly shocking. of course, i sent barry a very nice email on friday morning, asking him to please put me in touch with the proper people at ford to discuss all these issues, to share with me the email and name of the man he mentioned on thursday night. i am still waiting to hear back from barry. i wonder if i will.
saturday night, at 745pm, while working in the yard, leslie herrick stopped by. she is running for city council and she lives a block over in the ford historic homes, which are not being affected at all by any of this construction. she stopped to talk to me about the issues i have been posting online - on social media and facebook over the last 9 months. she had a lot of questions. i had a lot of answers. she talked to me for 45 minutes. she had nothing new to add, no answers or solutions, but she still stopped by to ask how we were doing and again - i was surprised. after months of no one giving us the time of day - i had 2 diff city people talk to me in a 3 day time span. fascinating.
in between these 2 discussions, our neighbor who lives 2 doors down and works at ford, saw carl on friday evening walking the dogs. he stopped carl to say that the campus overhaul was going on hiatus. that the man who was in charge had been fired, and someone new had been brought in and the new guy hated it all - hated the plans, the layout, and esp said it was all too expensive. that the parking deck right across from us was being stopped where it was and finished as is - not expanded to the 1,000 feet it was originally going to be, and that the whole project was going on hiatus while plans were being redesigned.
for real? i still have no proof this is the new direction, but no new pieces have been added to the deck since last week. and on saturday they only worked until noon instead of 4 or 6 pm. and the digging on the foundation has stopped. so what is going on? agian - we have to wait and see.
in the meantime, i am hoping to have fordland people come survey the house and tell us what they can do to fix the issues they have caused. one of our neighbors is involved in the project, the construction end of it, and he sent me a long email about how none of the work being done is supposed to be affecting our home, and i told him i appreciated the info but i have been watching with my own eyes what has happened to our house and while general construction rules may work for other places - my home was not some other place. and that my before and after pictures were very different things. he replied that the money to fix our issues would be a drop in the bucket compared to the total budget and that ford should have no problem fixing things. now if only he was right....
in recent months, as the parking deck work has moved form it's beginnings near nowlin street toward our home, there have been a number of water main breaks on elmdale. i think, in fact, doug said there had been 5 at his house, and phil has had 2 or 3. elmdale is an old street. the sewer under it is old. home owners down about 6 blocks the other way from us talked about sewer breaks that caused sink holes in their yards, and only a few years back there was a sink hole at the sewer drain at elmdale and edison, and then a large deep depression formed in the berm along the ford fence line. there is a lot of empty space under the road. you can hear it when cars drive by - hear the weird reverberations down into the cavern under the street. of course that will affect our home in a diff way than other homes. something about the strata of the earth here, and the emptiness under the street, has caused our home to react in a different manner than other homes would. but a big corporation is not interested in these things - except they should be as the street is mere feet from all of the new design work and planned building, and if old sewer lines and water mains cause sinkholes, and the area has already proven that - wouldn't ford be interested in maintaining the soil and strength of the ground where they are building? and therefor wouldn't they have done surveys and realized the houses along the street were not going to hold up as well as ford wanted them to? or did i cause such a commotion in the beginning that ford and the city figured they would simply let our home go to pieces because i was a fly in the ointment? because i had been vocal enough to say this plan was bad for our neighborhood and that we would suffer so the rest of the city could benefit?
well, knowing there had been sinkholes, and knowing that the first batch of sight line trees had been planted incorrectly last autumn, i emailed the city in late sept to tell them, and fordland, that the trees were having issues. yes - they had lived, which surprised me because they were planted at such a weird time of year and no one ever came to water them or care for them, and most of the spring they truly looked dead, but one of them was for sure sinking into the ground, and next to it was a new large depression in the soil. the city came out to investigate. they said the tree's root ball had shrunk due to dry conditions, and that the sewers were fine. i thanked them for the good news. within a few days, the fairlane greens people who mow the lawn on the other side of the fence (fordland) showed up to put large amounts of dirt in each hole a tree had been planted in. then, they placed a large amount of mulch around each tree, all the way up to the trunk. it looks nice, but will kill the trees. any episode of this old house will teach you that. mulch causes the bark to rot and kills the tree. oh well. right? they are not my trees, i did not pay for them, but it is sad they won't last due to incorrect planting standards.
that is how i feel about this whole project - it will not last due to incorrect planning standards. and besides - ford is so far behind all the other companies doing the electric and autonomous car thing - who knows how long they will even be around. they will become, just like the acres of forest they clear cut, steamrolled, and nonexistent.
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