Pay no attention to the hole behind the fence

Over the last few months if you had asked me to compose a sentence using the words "ground" and "Giant Eagle", I would probably have composed something like:

"If you shop at the Giant Eagle in New Kensington, remember that the ground could open up beneath your feet and swallow you whole."

This morning I opened my door to pick up my Sunday Valley News Dispatch, and the top story with a headline in a font I thought they were saving for the next time the Steelers go to the championships was "Giant Eagle ground beef recalled". And I thought to myself, "that's a new way to put those words together."

At various times during the summer the sinkhole repair site has had equipment positioned such that it was hard for anyone outside to see just what was happening. In recent weeks a huge pile of dirt appeared between the sinkhole and the Clarion Hotel parking lot. And the pile is so high that it obstructs the view of the hole from the higher ground. I have been wondering whether all that dirt actually came out of the repair site, or whether it was brought here in order to keep filling the sinkhole.

Near the end of this week it became possible to see into the repair site again. It seems as if the contaminated meat scare pulls attention away from the unexplained hole in the ground. The story that there is bad meat that you can throw away or return to the store gets headlines. The story that there is an unexplained hole in the ground that has grown since it first appeared in mid-July gets yawns -- as big as the yawning hole one can now see through the fence.

This is such a strange place to live.

File under : New Kensington, food, safety, wierd