Sinkholes Could Help The City

People of this country have always been great at taking a negative and turning it into a positive, to turn lemons into lemonade.

That's why it pains me to hear our city leaders moaning about the ever-growing family of sinkholes in south Cape Girardeau. They say their existence within our fair city is dire. Life as we know it, may cease to exist because of these geologic aberrations.

What pessimists!

While some people want to know why the ground is disappearing, I feel that is a moot point. It just is. Nature happens. I think that rather than fretting about this problem and trying to dream up ways to fix it, we should instead embrace the situation and rejoice at our good fortune.

Unlike our city leaders, I believe that sinkholes are not a bad thing to have as a neighbor. Let's make lemonade, I say.

Granted, the family of the poor fellow in Florida whose bedroom was sucked into a sinkhole while he was sleeping a few months ago might disagree. But that was a unique situation and it did occur in Florida where weird things tend to happen such as hanging chads.

I feel that rather than wasting money trying to fix what is unfixable, our City should treat this situation as a gift, not a curse.

For instance, last week the City Council of Cape voted to raise trash fees to compensate for all the extra maintenance the 3-year-old automated refuse system is requiring.

No one seems to know the exact reason for the higher than projected maintenance. It could be that we have some junior Kurt Busch's operating the trucks who practice doing donuts and burn outs when no one is looking.

Or it could be the fact that the number of miles the trucks are driven is approximately double that of the old system because the automatic arm only picks up from one side of the street, unlike the old inefficient process where Bob the Trash Man could do both in one pass.

Personally, I think we should scrap the whole thing, and buy every home a nice metal barrel where residents can dispose of their trash weekly by dousing it with gasoline and tossing in a match. While some might consider that a bit extreme, Cape does have a precedence by allowing the neighborhood pyromaniacs to torch yard waste almost anytime they please, so why not regular trash?

But I digress. You may be wondering how a family of sinkholes can help an out-of-control maintenance problem with the city's trash trucks? Actually, they can't. BUT the sinkholes could help reduce the city's costs in other ways that would then help pay for this needed maintenance.

According to the city Public Works Director, the sinkholes are something of a feat of natural engineering.

In the June 10 issue of this paper he said, "You can put stuff in these (sinkholes) and it just disappears and we've done that for several years. If we filled the holes up, by tomorrow [the fill] would be gone."

That, my friends, is a miracle solution for disposing of our trash.

Rather than hauling thousands of tons of refuse to the landfill each year as the city does now, our fleet of trash trucks could just dump their loads directly into these sinkholes and let Mother Nature flush it away.

The hundreds of thousands of dollars that will be saved in annual disposal fees can then be put to better use such as maintaining the trash trucks.

And I would imagine the city could reduce trash fees by say, one dollar per household per annum. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but the city has to be cautious with its revenue and keep plenty of cash on hand in case of an emergency.

For instance, what if a giant sinkhole opened up under City Hall during a council meeting and swallowed everyone and everything leaving just a giant crater in its place? We would not only have to buy a new city hall, we would also have to elect a whole new council.

And that would be just awful. Lemonade, anyone?