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Comment by mschy | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it was totally the city's fault that the Chicago Tunnel Company built and abandoned a collection of illegally dug tunnels under the city.

It is also totally the city's fault that the previous participants in the Chicago Tunnel Company's experiment didn't protect themselves against a flood in that infrastructure.

It is totally the city's fault that despite the tunnels not being a public responsibility, they had started a bidding process to get the leak fixed, though it wasn't completed before the flood.

Yeah... totally the city's fault.

Reader's note: There are elements of sarcasm in my post.

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It was totally the city's fault because the city owned the tunnels. See the FAQ: http://users.ameritech.net/pokeefe571/ctcfaq.htm

Q: Why were the tunnels under State Street and Dearborn Street demolished to make room for the rapid transit subways? Didn't the Tunnel Company have any say so in the matter?

A: The Chicago Tunnel Company owned only the locomotives, rolling stock, track, and overhead wire. The City of Chicago owned the tunnels. Because of this, the Tunnel Company didn't have much choice but to give up their most profitable trackage when subway construction was started by the city. You can't fight City Hall!

Well that weakens my point substantially, but I still think that 'totally' is too much blame.

If you leave your building hooked up to an open tunnel line, something could come in through it. And that something could be water (or gas, or rodents...).

Claiming that's "totally" the city's fault strikes me as a dangerous abdication of personal responsibility.

It is the government's responsibility to protect the common good, even from threats not of their making or even illegal in origin.

Government is one of the few places where "could have and didn't" becomes the same as "did".

The Katrina debacle is the largest example of this.

City Hall was one of the flooded buildings. They had an "unprotected" connection to the "illegal" tunnels.

Okay, so City Hall was responsible for the damage to City Hall.

But blaming the city for everything still strikes me as absurd. It was a private enterprise that dug tunnels without getting permits from the city, and it created a problem.

Saying it's totally the city government's fault strikes me as nonsense given that reality.

I'll grant them some responsibility, because government does tend to clean up when private industry leaves a mess, but it seems far from total to me.

"built and abandoned" - you're missing the bit where they spent three or four decades operating a company between those two events.

How illegal were they anyway?

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