More water in the street

After all that rain, seems we missed the rivers in the street.  No matter.  Seems the water pipe outside my neighbor's house broke, again.  This happened about a year after I moved here and was fixed after a time, but for nearly a year after still looked like a construction site, with the sidewalk tiles piled to one side and an open sandy pit in the middle.  This time around resulted in gallons and gallons of water, just pouring into the street.  Visualize draining an Olympic swimming pool with a hose the diameter of your head.  The problem should be easy to fix, after all the pipes are only a few feet below the surface of the ground, but call after call to Embasa, the water company, got no answer - it was a Friday afternoon when it began to pour out water, after all. 

So Sunday afternoon, finally, after two days of who knows how much clean water is running down the street into the open sewer storm drain at the end of the road, some guys with a small bulldozer and a dump truck came out to dig a big hole and stop the flow.  This process took the better part of an afternoon, during which for some of the time, the workers just sat on the curb with their bare feet in the running water as it went down the gutter.  All that is left behind now is the pile of sidewalk squares, a lot of dirt, and a roughly covered hole. Lets see how many months the pile of tiles will remain untouched.  Doesn't matter I guess, after all, we all prefer to walk in the street.