It isn’t much of a Fourth of July expectation. It won’t pop or go bang or even challenge the wildest imagination, but if you come across a St. Paul storm sewer opening absent its protective grate, call 651-266-9700, wait for the prompt and report it to the sewer crew. If you see it happening, call 911. Personally, I would pin the creep, or creeps, up against a tree with my car, but I suppose that would be insensitive.
About 10 days or so ago, it was reported that vandals had pried loose more than 150 sewer grates and let them fall into the basin. The grates weigh 150 pounds. This doesn’t play well with guys predisposed to neurosis anyway. We don’t need a kid thrown off a scooter or a walker in the gloaming breaking an ankle or a bicyclist going ass over teakettle. I had to look that phrase up, having used it all my life. It means what you think it means, suddenly losing control and balance and taking a tumble. Why tea kettle? Couldn’t find an answer.
“I don’t think anybody would drown,” Sean Kershaw, the city’s director of public works, said, “you wouldn’t enter the sewer system, but you could get a concussion or break something.”
Kershaw said it isn’t happening in other cities. The grates are not being stolen and then sold. He wonders if it’s a TikTok challenge. The police have not arrested anybody yet and Kershaw’s crews fetch the grates out of the basin with hooks and put them back in place as soon as they get a report.
“We don’t know what to think,” Kershaw said. “We’ve kicked around the idea that somebody might think something good or bad might be coming out of the sewer.”
Oh, no.
“You mean like a clown with a balloon?”
“What was that movie?” Kershaw said.
“’It,’” I said, surprised that I remembered. I’m not much of a Stephen King loyalist, although I went through that whole terrified-of-clowns thing with kids I used to have.
Kershaw runs a tight ship. He takes his work seriously, which tends to stand out when you consider that we don’t know when members of the least diverse city council in the county even bother to show up for work. It bothers Kershaw that he can’t come up with a reason that somebody would do something so pointless and so dangerous. First darkened street lights and now this, gaping open sewer basins. It probably isn’t a clown with a balloon, but the way this city is going, nothing would surprise me, not even the city’s sewer system suddenly in the hands of the paranormal.
One day years ago, while walking in the Crocus Hill neighborhood, I saw some teens push open a manhole cover from below and climb out onto the street. I don’t think they were the type to vandalize grates. They were explorers, apparently having navigated quite a distance, endangering only themselves.
So far, no injuries have been reported because of a missing grate. We’re lucky. It should bother everybody that such a dangerous criminal act was even dreamed up. A missing grate might rank below gun play, car thefts, assaults, war, pestilence and muggings, but what could possibly be the point? It’s a foul that additionally cheapens the quality of life.
As for the streetlights, Kershaw said the copper wire thefts are diminishing. But there is better news. On Aug. 1, the theft of the copper wire will be classified as a felony.
“The repeat offenders,” Kershaw said, “have just cycled through the system.”
Meaning we don’t really punish anybody with enough consequences to make them think twice about spoiling what we gamely pass off as our civic tranquility. That changes on Aug. 1. It won’t be so easy to waltz right back to the street and fall into a sewer opening.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.
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