fast forward a few centuries. the mill pond is now surrounded by suburban houses on their 1 acre lots. the people with some adjacency to the pond (my family included) enjoy the serene little piece of artificial "nature". increases the property values too.
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one day, after a big hurricane remnant rainstorm blew threw it caused some really severe flooding and destabilized the dam. a few stones got washed loose, it starts draining the pond, the dam looks like it's days are numbered.
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some folks get together and try to figure out what to do about it. they call the town government and are told the town has no jurisdiction so they have to call the state government instead.
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the state government says they don't have jurisdiction because technically the pond is entirely enclosed by private property and is presumably privately owned. none of the homeowners with property frontage on the pond have anything about owning the pond in their deeds though.
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this bullshit takes a couple of weeks to sort it out and ends with a giant "shrug, whatever, not my problem" from the government. thanks guys. so a couple of the private property owners hire some dudes to come in and try to MacGuyver up a repair to the dam.
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not much that can be done on a tight budget, but some sandbags to bolster the crumbling structure are deployed. it buys a couple of weeks time at best. but now that someone has done something, well, NOW the state government decides it cares about the situation.
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the people are told by the gov that it is illegal to interfere with an environmentally protected resource. everyone involved promptly disavows their involvement under penalty of yoooj fines and being held personally responsible for any property damage caused if the dam breaks.
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now that the state has decided they have authority here, and have threatened the private property owners to make them not do anything, you would expect them to send in a team to fix it, right?
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hahaha are you even paying attention? No, this happened in America, nobody is gonna fix shit. The state does an assessment and decides that it will cost a few million dollars to repair the dam properly. That's not in this year's budget. They don't do a damn thing.
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It's been a few months now. The sandbags have given out and the dam finally collapses. It's a bit anti-climactic really. Could have been more of a scene but mostly it just fucked up a few hundred meters of drainage watershed. The mill pond empties and is now a muddy swamp.
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Everyone is unhappy. Everyone loses property value. A scenic bit of "nature" is now replaced by a stinking mosquito breeding ground. The state never did get around to doing anything to restore the area. The end.
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