Wet Weather Blamed For Wall Collapse At Thompson Park – WWNY TV 7

A 15 foot section of wall is missing at Watertown's Thompson Park. The sight leaves strollers in the park stunned.

"Just shocking. I haven't seen anything like it in all the years I've walked up here," said Tim Shaugnessy, passerby.

The city engineer says this was discovered last weekend.

There's little doubt what happened. A drain pipe ran through the lower part of the wall. If it was broken, Mother Nature did the rest.

"All these heavy rains may have been undermining that wall and washing out the soil through it. The fact that it went was probably just a matter of time, really," said Justin Wood, city engineer.

Any fix looks expensive, but the first steps include careful measurements of the damage and coming up with options, such as...

"Placement of embankment fill to build it back up or building it back up with a retaining wall and then looking at the aesthetics, of course, with the Olmsted design," said Wood.

The famed Olmsted Company designed the park around 1900.

With so much of this stonework throughout the park, all of it about a century old, will this collapse lead to a closer look at it?

"I think that's fair to say. There's an enormous amount of stonework up there that needs to be maintained. And so that's something we need to continue to look at," said Wood.

And continue to hope for kinder treatment from Mother Nature.

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Wet Weather Blamed For Wall Collapse At Thompson Park - WWNY TV 7