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Originally Posted by johnny pinwheel
did they ever think of fixing the dirt surface? softer base, deeper cushion? instead, its a man-made piece of garbage!
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I'm sure they have thought of that, but the reason, I would venture, that the CA dirt tracks were hard as rock is that, for all that these torrential rainstorms have been in the news, southern CA is a desert. That's the climate. Yes, a dirt track could be put in, but the cost of keeping it soft and deep will be quite a bit. The synthetic was an attempt to get what the Northeast gets without having to pay the difference for being in a different climate.
It's business- you try to get as much as you can and pay as little as you can. The horse owners aren't the track owners- it's not the track owner that loses money when the horse breaks down on the track and I doubt the horse owners are interested in paying for the track maintenance because it's not their property.
What sucks, of course, is that, as in most business-related things where risk is compared with cost, the biggest victims are the ones who don't have any say in the situation; in this case the horses.
So, the ongoing solution to find an inexpensive, easy solution goes on. And it reminds me of the old adage that there's cheap; there's fast; and there's good, and you can have two out of the three.