To the editor:

We recently saw a description of human death resulting from neglected street repair. We see a contractor who had responsibility to restore a section of street, and had not done so for two weeks after the work finished. It was quickly patched up by the city — after the tragedy. How difficult would it have been to drive by when the project was done, and see whether they had restored the street?

In my own neighborhood, we had two gaping cuts in streets left for weeks after water line replacement. Repeated phone calls got them fixed, but there is still a lot of damage to curbs from heavy equipment that hasn’t been touched — two months after the project finished. This probably isn’t a hazard, but it shows how the city is all too willing to just dump work on contractors and forget it, never holding them accountable for quality or completion. It’s mostly just a nuisance that degrades the quality of neighborhoods — but sometimes it can kill.