Discussion for article #242634
What’s with the picture of people eating outside ? The picture seems to have nothing to do with the news copy. This was at an IHOP restaurant? Then there’s too much hopping going on.
Or we could think like Hucksterbee and Ben Carson think; this is obviously the work of the Devil, but thankfully all the people I-Hopping were Christians, so no one was injured.
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Aliens?
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The Meridian Fault Line. Earthquake!!
Thanks, Obama!
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Boy, obesity is a problem in the South!
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It looks (from photos and news reports you can find if you Google this event) like someone let the folks who put up the building and parking lot get away with a really shoddy rainwater drainage plan. There’s this 50 ft wide 600 ft long cave-in that goes from a concrete culvert on one end down to an outlet into a creek at the low end.
The IHOP just opened a week ago and there have been heavy rains during that time. None of the pictures show any pipe or pipe remains in the bed of the cave-in, so perhaps what happened is that someone decided to save a bit of money by just skipping the laying of pipe. It would seem that the alternate plan of just letting rainwater accumulate on the high side of a parking lot acting as a dam, did not take into account this habit that water has of finding its way downhill. In this case it looks like that cussed rainwater chose to seep through the loose soil underneath this newly constructed parking lot, and it didn’t take long for seeping to turn into roaring as the flow of water took soil with it downstream, and before you know it, Nature had dug itself a new tributary to the creek.
There’s a reason we have Civil Engineering, and govt that enforces building codes. Perhaps Mississippi has evolved beyond such small-minded concerns…
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Definitely not the IHOP in Meridian - a cursory search shows it at 200 N. Frontage Road, which is is an access road on the north side (duh) of Interstate 59. The opposite side of the interstate appears to be a Harley dealership.
Sherman’s lot?
There’s footage at the weather-com site that shows a very large corrugated iron water conduit ending abruptly where the cave-in begins on the parking lot’s presumably uphill side. The camera pans what is now a big trench with over a dozen vehicles at its bottom, but no evidence of the corrugated iron you would expect continuing the water conduit under the former parking lot.
The folks who built this thing apparently just let the water conduit end blind where it reached the parking lot.at its uphill side. I guess they thought the water would just back up the conduit, and whatever area the conduit drained in the larger storm drain system in that area would just be out of luck. But the damn water insisted on going downhill instead. Who could have figured!? It ended up going downhill right under their parking lot, eventually undermining it.
Water going downhill? Damn! Must be a sign of the End Times. Let’s get Bachmann on the case.
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I hop, when there’s a 15 foot deep 14,000 sq. ft. hole in front of me, I hop as far as I can.
I personally don’t eat sponge cakes so unless the ground caves in under my local family owned Mexican joint, I’m good.
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One of the photos at the Meridian Star shows a metal pipe at the other end, but only where it would be exposed. It looks like they didn’t bother to lay a pipe connecting the two sections underneath the parking lot, though possibly it’s just completely buried. Obviously they screwed up something with it.
Less regulation would have relocated their cars to the Gulf of Mexico where Donald tRump would have them deported.
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Well, in favor of that theory is that this section of corrugated iron pipe sure looks collapsed, and the weather.com footage shows similar corrugated (but it looks like a wider bore) collapsed under the highway end of the conduit. But at that end, no corrugated iron is visible in the parking lot section of what is now a trench.
Sure, the iron could be buried under cars and other debris in that section. But what I can’t understand about this theory is why the corrugated iron would collapse along the entire 600 ft length of what is now a trench. The individual sections of corrugated iron wouldn’t be that long, would they? Maybe the ones under the parking lot would collapse under the weight of 15 vehicles, but why is this section stove in? It looks like we’re hundreds of feet past the parking lot, and any load the pipe would have had to bear.
The other problem is the volume displaced. The trench isn’t so massive here in this section depicted, but it’s huge in the parking lot section of its length. No way would a collapse of this caliber corrugated iron pipe create such a large volume trench. Even for the section in this picture, I’m not sure the volumes work.
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In Russia Mississippi, restaurant eats you.
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I agree. You can clearly see the pipe collapsed and a strong stream of water running through the area. Therefore could be (1) pipe not designed to be driven over, (2) pipe at upstream end not connected properly. In any case the engineer, contractor, and IHOP will have claims placed against them.
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