Palm Bay Road – The Road Of Eternal Destruction
Last October I was part of the Eternal Destruction Palm Bay Road Crew Band for the harvest party we held at Covenant Presbyterian Church. It was obviously a joke we put together to poke fun at the snail’s pace of construction but, no joke, it is now 5 months later and although we are a little further along in the destruction process on Palm Bay Road, it doesn’t seem like it is any closer to being completed in my lifetime.
While the project has been underway since January 3, 2008, that’s 2 years and 3 months for those counting, it seems like an eternity. The reason for the long delay is is probably because I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than about 4 people working on the road at any one time. What I’m talking about is actual work, not a bunch of road construction supervisors standing around a hole trying to make it deeper by telekinesis. The Eternal Destruction Palm Bay Road Crew Band had more working members than does the crew working on the eternal road of destruction.
The entire construction zone, if that’s what you insist on calling it, is 4.5 miles long from Robert J Conlan Blvd to Minton Road so, that makes the current rate of destruction approximately 6 months per mile. Let’s hope we don’t stretch that out to 1 year per mile. Anyone willing to place a bet? There are a few 20 yard stretches here and there that do appear to be completed and have traffic moving in both directions on 3 lanes each however, these seem to be more like anomalies than actual finished sections of road when 3 days after completion, out cometh the orange cones because someone needs to move a drain hole 10 feet. That is, after discovering that water in fact does flow downhill.
If you were wondering, the whole plan may have simply been designed to drain money out of some state budget fund somewhere that was probably showing a surplus. The surplus was probably an accounting error and will eventually rear its ugly head one way or another, likely showing up mysteriously in a future tax bill from Brevard County.
The reason I’ve dreamt up this somewhat nutty conspiracy theory is because there is no actual completion date for this project according to the Florida Department of Transportation. And after a 5 minute search of the web for additional information as to the date we can look forward to a ribbon cutting ceremony, free bar-b-que and a cold brewski for tolerating this nonsense for an eternity, none was to be found.
Maybe we could get a few Fla DOT construction supervisors on a completion date estimate instead of looking down that hole trying to make it deeper?