Leaving your car parked for four days with a dead key fob battery isn’t too long. It takes most people about 5 or 6 days to construct a new key fob battery from raw materials that they mine and process themselves.
Mains of different years and materials makes a difference. Our Main is from early 1900s never a break, but the spin cast mains in the 50’s made from old battleships is the worst. Mapping out main breaks it looks like the ring of fire based on expansion of our fair City
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You should have put up an adjacent road marker designating it as the Oklahoma Prairie National Forest. 
(Isn’t that part of OK actually a combination of prairie and scrub tree country?)
That happened to a guy across the street from me fifteen years ago. He had the habit of parking in front of the hydrant in front of his yard. Then the house two doors down from there (catty corner across from me) burned at dawn one morning. As the fire truck arrived it pulled up curbside right behind his car and pushed his car forward out of the way after which a cop wrote out a nice ticket for him.
Older parts of St. Louis city and some of the oldest suburbs have water and sewer lines so old there aren’t accurate maps of the underground utilities. Even my suburban neighborhood which is almost forty-five years old turned out to have inaccurate mapping of all the utilities, including natural gas pipelines.
All the underground electric, telephone lines, and cable TV lines were originally installed without being encased in pipe sheathing and ended up all needing replacement a few years ago. Even with horizontal boring machines everyone’s yards and sections of streets were a mess. My front yard had eleven open holes all one summer four years ago. At least the street out front stayed intact.
Most (?all?) cars have an alternate way of starting when the key fob battery dies (they all die eventually), including a built in key or an RFID type system based in the car. There really is no excuse for parking in front of a hydrant for 4 days (or 1 day!), especially in a city.
Also, it looks like he was using a plastic bag for his right rear window.
The fine seems pretty low.
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That would actually be preferred. Places where I have lived, you own it but the city/town and utilities have easement rights. Homeowner is responsible for the lateral. You also have to pay for the sidewalk…
Putting water lines under city-owned streets is the standard practice, especially for mains (where else are you gonna put 'em)? At that point, it sounds more like an issue with incompetence on the part of whoever is making the “fix”.
Normally sewer lines are run down alleys and water lines are run along the side of the street or or on the city easement between the edge of the street and edge of the sidewalk.
The various pipeline entities that have performed various water line work simply refers to those running lines down the middle of the road as being “morons”. Every time there’s a leak that necessitates tearing up the roadway and diverting traffic.
Even after 3 grant programs over 20+ years (meaning your tax dollars since this involved the Feds also) the middle of the road water lines (which were supposed to be removed from the system) continued to leak, This led to parallel water lines; one in the middle of the road and one on the side of the road. Throw enough taxpayer money at it and it will eventually get resolved. Or not.
Hmm, I guess I’m not envisioning the street centerline; I agree it would be pretty idiotic to place the mains somewhere that would require shutting down traffic in both directions. With that said, I’ve seen lots and lots of cases where the larger water mains are not placed off to the side, and while maybe not under the roadway centerline, are usually underneath one of the outside lanes of the street. The work still involves 1-2 lanes+sidewalk closure, and more often than not the pavement itself is getting torn up.
You can do that out west where the cities grew up after the invention of the automobile. Here in the East were cities were well established the easiest place to run the water lines was in the middle of the road. Mainly horse and buggy traffic. The roads are usually significantly narrower here.
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The middle of the road line in front of my house started bubblng through the pavement once. They fixed it and a few months later a repeat a foot down,. Then another repeat. This happened 7 or 8 times over the years. The city did not even cover it with asphalt anymore. Eventually the grass grew over the dirt mound.
A year or so later a maple tree took root right in the middle of the road. I just let it go but I guess someone got tired of driving around it and cut it down one day. It was about 4 feet tall before some lumberjack felled it.
Around here they run it offset from the middle so that you can’t avoid the manhole covers if you stay in your lane. Then they repave the street by pouring a new layer of asphalt on top of the old, which now means the manhole covers are sunk below street level and you slam into 'em if anyone’s coming from the other direction and you can’t swerve to miss them.
Storm Sanitary and water mains are under the pavement in the vast majority of our city. While repaving the casting that holds the manhole cover is adjusted with adjusting rings to match the elevation of the new roadway.
The state/county road crews in Maryland scrape the top layer off the roads before they repave. There is no offset height with utilities access in the roadway. The scraped asphalt is also ground and mixed with new stuff as a form of recycling.
In recent decades many water companies, both privately owned and municipal, stopped using corrosion control sacrificial anodes on water main lines. Since the biggest cost of using anodes to protect aging lines is the labor involved opening and closing the ground, many water companies began simply patching leaks while gradually replacing entire lines with new pipes that are either corrosion resistant coated or high pressure PVC. Gas utilities have been doing the same.
Sacrificial anodes still are used in a variety of industrial uses but advances in materials and coatings have significantly lessened the market for many sizes and types of anodes.
A number of years ago our water utility stated to install sacrificial anodes to mains after a repair.
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There, I fixed it for you.
The sometimes is not what I said, in our fair city it is always! I have not seen an example of what you speak in my travels.
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