News You Can''t Use: City Subcontractor Demolished Wrong House

People make mistakes. That's why pencils have erasers and prisons have those giant revolving doors. Since governments are just many people combining like a semi-functional version of Voltron it's to be expected that they, too, will sometimes make errors. Usually little things, like being replaced by self-aware cameras, giving weapons to criminals or tracking absolutely every move you make. Sometimes the failures are a bit more obvious, like destroying the wrong house.

Imagine driving up to your home – or vacation home – and realizing it’s not there.

This is not my beautiful house! Really, it isn't. It's a pile of rubble.

It happened in the Lake Worth section of Fort Worth last Friday when a city subcontracted demolition crew took down the wrong house in the 9700 block of Watercress Drive.  The crews apparently demolished the house next door to what was the original targeted property.

I like the use of "apparently." "So it would appear." "Our best guess..."

"Not the targeted property? Whoa!!!"

 

“Typical city,” said neighbor Stephen Neumann, laughing.

I mean, am I right or what? Ho, ho, ho.

Neumann ruefully observes this kind of mistake has happened along the lake before and that he keeps his own property spritzed up to avoid any confusion.

He wrote "don't tear this one down" in huge letters on the garage door. Yes, "spritzing" is just the thing to prevent disaster. Keep yourself spritzed up to prevent that punitive audit!

“I just seen an excavator tearing that house down and I was wondering why,” he said adding, “It was a pretty good house, it wasn’t all that bad. When this one next door has been needing tearing down for years.”

It's sort of like those doctors that amputate the wrong limb, leave their car keys where your appendix used to be or you come in for a routine checkup and instead get chemically castrated. "I was wondering why he was exposing my genitals to massive amounts of radiation, but was too shy to say anything. I'm not the expert, after all."

The city calls it a mistake.

The assigning blame to a convenient scape-goat process is still ongoing. The current frontrunner is anyone who wants lower taxes or fewer regulations.

The owner of the demolished property actually has a permanent home at Eagle Mountain Lake. CBS 11 has been unable to contact the owner, but it’s expected they’ll be compensated for the loss.

By that we mean it will be declared an "Act of God." 

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Komment Korner   

OH NO!!! All of my Van Goghs & ming dynasty vases were in there!

It's Bushes fault!

Sorry you're thinking of old school government. We have new school government now. Things are different.

The reported did a good job on the story.

Aaron Zehner's first novel The Foolchild Invention is available in e-book format at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.