More than half are the victims of the paramilitaries, who seek to drain towns of suspected guerrilla sympathizers but sometimes simply do the dirty work for large landowners who want to expand their holdings for cattle raising, coca growing or mining.
Soldiers have been using explosives to clear the blockage and drain the town.
A well-trained team of pickpockets could drain this town of its assets faster than a Grinch in Whoville.
But then Salisbury is so small that the first selectman, Val Bernardoni, can survey every road, every culvert, every drain in town in a mere two days.
Indeed, some huge churches, already politically influential, are becoming catalysts for local economic development, challenging a conventional view that churches drain a town financially by generating lower-paid jobs, taking land off the property-tax rolls and increasing traffic.
And a drainage plan was discovered that allowed the land to drain through town land toward Long Island Sound, not toward New York City's water supply in the Kensico Reservoir, which would have required the developer to meet the standards of the City Department of Environmental Protection.
We have an active land trust, and the Branford River Project has labeled every sewer drain in town to warn people that anything they put in it goes into the Long Island Sound and the Branford River".
"These are going to be very expensive homes that you're not going to get children in," Mrs. Miloski said, addressing the common concern that private homes would drain the town's resources instead of replenishing them.
It grew ahead as a stopping off point on Route 66, but the building of a by-pass in 1979 again drained the town of visitors.
We were lucky enough to have a willing member of the Cave Clan take us and our gang of models on a tour of some of the friendlier drains around town, and also managed to speak to Doug, the guy who started it all and, incidentally, who came up with their awesome logo.
