Well, sort of. The videos on this YouTUBE channel run more like silly PSAs about the culture, they barely chronicle much of anything. Still, it's not an experience I think people need pass up. I will finish watching them all at some point this week and will pick out a few that are need-to-see.
Insofar, however, I'm not that impressed. Although, some of the history here, the people, places, and things does a good job of displaying them in a sort of digestible diorama.
I can't say that I'm totally against this, especially highly contagious plagues -- and most of the time when the term "plague" is in play, we're talking about one of those. From Wakkipedia:
Under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, it is against British law to ride in a taxi if you are suffering from the plague. Smallpox, typhus and cholera are also forbidden to taxi-passengers.
Someone should tell the UK that cholera can only be transmitted via contaminated food and water; so, unless taxi drivers in the UK have gotten into the habit of drinking and/or eating their passenger's food (or their passengers), maybe that one isn't such a huge concern.
Among the photos is a surreal, depressing display of the shrinking puddle and mud slick as people have been describing it on Twitter. News reports suggest that the merchants (hopefully listening to civil engineers) expect that the lake can be refilled and running again by Nov 1.
Not much else to report on the thing, people are certainly enjoying the spectacle of the failure. Civil engineers are still arguing about how to repair he failure, there's probably an investigation in place and I expect a lawsuit. I am interested in how much the repairs are estimated to cost. Not just the cost of patching or replacing the section, but the economic cost of the failure to the reputation of Tempe.
From the looks of it, the Fake Lake aka Tempe Town Toilet will be closed into mid fall as repairs are made to the 16’ section of rubberized dam that failed last night around 10pm. The flash flood down the normally dry Salt River bed must have really confused a lot of people! However, it seems like an inevitable thing to have happened.
I’ve never been a fan of the fake lake from its inception to its current status as dirty sapphire looking pool. However, it’s become such a fixture of the landscape—and one of the boundaries to Mill Ave—that I’ve come to accept it as it is. A type of natural disaster held in place to raise property prices while making a giggling mockery of our desert ecosystem. The river itself, of course, had been changed by the installation of Hoover dam (far, far up river) and it used to be Hayden’s Ford and the location of Hayden’s Ferry.
I really think that having an actual river there would be far less contemptible than a man-made lake.
"All of a sudden, we heard this ka-boom and the ground started shaking," said 13-year-old Lukas Henderson, who was biking on the northside of the lake with his sister and father.
Witnesses said the dry Salt River filled as far as the eye could see within seconds, and small animals could seen scrambling away from the floodwaters.
Warning sirens began wailing within minutes, and officers rushed along the riverbed to warn anyone — particularly transients known to camp on the river bottom during the summer — of the approaching water.
I will be checking in with my transient friends on Mill Ave as soon as possible to make sure everyone is okay. Not many still sleep or frolic along the river bed; so I don’t expect many of them would have been affected by the flash flood from the failure.
It seems fortunate that it’s not foul play, because, really, if someone damages the dam they only hurt Tempe. Even if we think it’s an eyesore that shouldn’t have been built in the first place, it still has gained a lot of function in the years it’s existed. The Tempe government has done a great deal of work attempting to leverage it and, while they apparently didn’t budget a maintenance routine that fit the wear-and-tear, this is the first actual disaster to befall the lake. It would be uncharitable to blame them for not predicting it.
In April 2009, Tempe officials said they intended to ignore a safety recommendation from the makers of Town Lake's rubber dams because sufficient safeguards already were in place to prevent the dams from deflating.
Kris Baxter, a spokeswoman for Tempe, said the city believed that Bridgestone's main concern was that boats on Town Lake could get near the dam and puncture it. The city responded to the concern by stringing a line of buoys across the lake to prevent boats from getting close to the dam.
Although, whoops! I still say it would be uncharitable to place too much blame, this is a high profile project, it’s one-of-a-kind—especially for Arizona—and a lot could go wrong. The worst didn’t happen (aside from gushing waters) and so far as I can tell nobody suffered injuries.
I say we wait and see.
Maybe they’ll have it fixed and working in time for the next Dragon Boat Festival.
The Phoenix New Times is running an article asking why Tempe, and by extension Mill Ave, isn't the favorite venue for a lot of bands. In fact, most of Arizona's musical talent likes Tucson a great deal more than Tempe!
It's possibly the oldest, loudest gripe in Phoenix's music scene: Why Tucson?
By that they mean, "Why is this cool band that I really love playing that bumblefuck shithole down South when they could play our sprawling metropolis of interconnected stripmalls?"
Electric Mustache's photographer/hatchetman Shawn Anderson weighed in after Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti booked not one, but two, shows in Ye Olde Pueblo this fall while spurning Our Nation's Fifth Largest City.
"So either Phoenix has become the sole embodiment of SB1070 and our smaller cities get a pass for being 'progressive college towns' or something else more (or even less) sinister is going on. If only someone that had any idea of what is going on would leave a comment letting us know," he writes.
The reasons listed go as follows:
Superior Venues, College Town Culture, Small-Potatoes Media, General Travelability, and Ability to avoid Shawn Anderson.
While some of these strike more of a chord than others. There are a certain number of things Mill Ave can do in order to alleviate these issues. Sure Tempe isn't exactly a "college town" but the atmosphere exists--in spite of all attempts to kill it!--and it could be easily harvested if people would only take advantage of it. We need something like Long Wong's again. We need the space behind Borders to become a venue for indie rock bands to play to small crowds, we really need something like The Coffee Planation to come back and make that corner a small space for bands to play in as well (but not half as loud.)
And on the small-potatos media. We could really use either staggering air time on Phoenix radio stations or something running out of ASU's transmitters that's dedicated to indie media. Rock, venues, literature. We have everything we need for the college types to tune into and be part of, they're just always barely beyond arms reach.
From the looks of it, the Fake Lake aka Tempe Town Toilet will be closed into mid fall as repairs are made to the 16’ section of rubberized dam that failed last night around 10pm. The flash flood down the normally dry Salt River bed must have really confused a lot of people! However, it seems like an inevitable thing to have happened.