While walking around the greater downtown area, I often find myself treading over a steel grate covering some enormous hole in the sidewalk that I assume serves as a storm drain and allows for utility access.
When I’m brave enough to look down through the grate, occasionally I notice that the distance between me and the next solid surface is 20 or more feet.
The grates are plenty solid, I’m sure, but some of them wobble strangely when you walk over them, or have warped slightly from thousands of husky midwesterners walking across them every day.
So I have to wonder, have these things ever failed catastrophically and caused someone to tumble down into the concrete darkness? I’d like to know whether I should be walking around these things or not.