You can hear six weeks of stress in Charles Roscoe's voice as he talks about the gigantic hole.

"I don't know what's going on, man, I've been so upset," he says, rubbing his forehead and eyes. "It's growing. It's growing away from the house, but it's growing. I'm trying to get some legal advice. I'm so messed up, I don't know what to do."

He sits in the quiet side room of the Honey Do Club, the bar he owns on 125th and St. Clair, talking about the early August day when a ruptured sewer pipe behind his house sucked down an asphalt basketball court and most of his back yard, leaving a hole big enough to bury his house.

"I came out of the house at 10:15 in the morning to go to work, and there it was. The rear wheel of my car was about 12 inches from the hole."

His wife Maria recalls seeing him through the back window of the house, crouching down as if to look at the back wheel of the car, like maybe he had a flat tire. Then he got in the car quickly and accelerated backward to get it out of harm's way.

"I thought I was dreaming, like this can't be real. I had walked right across that area the night before when I came home, and you couldn't see nothing wrong," he says.

It was raining after midnight when he got home from work, and unbeknownst to him, a 5-foot storm sewer was gnawing away at the bottom of his back yard. These things don't typically run through back yards: Big pipes usually follow along beneath the streets, but the house was built in 1925, and the city figures the galvanized steel sewer pipe was laid to culvert a stream before that, then buried to level its ravine to build new houses up the hillside along Taylor Road. The Roscoes never even knew it was there.

But after more than 80 years, a hole rusted through the top of the pipe, and as mid-summer rains continually washed through, the rush of water began to carry away dirt that was holding up the yard, opening up a cavity beneath the ground that finally gave way that morning. One neighbor in the apartment building that overlooks their back yard told him he saw it happen all at once, at about 9:30 in the morning: Whoosh, and the basketball court was gone. Another claims not to have seen it, but to have heard the slurry sound.

"I could see the water swirling," Roscoe says, "like it was an underground river. It was scary. My grandsons play back there."

He went inside and told Maria, "It's a big hole in the back."

"I thought he meant like this," she says, holding out her arms. A gold "Mrs. Honey Do" pendant dangles from a chain around her neck. "I said, "What kind of hole?' And he said the whole ground back there was caved in."

COIT ROAD Losing ground, a little farther downstream.

Now the sink hole is about 25 feet across, and just about that deep, too. A portable basketball hoop - the kind with a big plastic base to keep it stable - is sinking deeper into the hole, taking a tangle of vines down the side. Roscoe's daughter Marissa, who with her three kids lives in the house with her parents, says there used to be two basketball hoops.

"The other one went down there," she says pointing to the hole, "and we haven't seen it since. It went that way." She points out into the back yard, then shoos her kids away from the edge of the hole.

SIX WEEKS LATER, the Roscoe family remains in the collective crosshairs of the weather and the decaying infrastructure of an old city, in a state and nation that prefer to build new rather than re-invest and maintain old things - especially old things that are buried.

"Out of sight, out of mind," said no fewer than three public officials interviewed for this story.

"Stuff like that happened all over," says county engineer Bob Klaiber. "Where years ago someone came to a city and said I want to fill this ravine in. It became a convenience to bury a pipe to get rid of an open stream. Nowadays the [Army] Corps of Engineers discourages culverting open streams like that. But it's infrastructure we inherited, so now we have to deal with it."

Northeast Ohio Sewer District Chief Erwin Odeal says sewer systems all over the region have 80- to 100-year-old pipes, with some parts of town, like the Flats and downtown, having had sewers for more than 150 years. Most follow the layout of the streets above them, which adds up to thousands of miles of roughly century-old storm sewers. The pavement of the city and the spread of the region has continually put more stress on them as more water runs off more roads and parking lots and rooftops into the system.

Some of the oldest pipes are still made of clay. Some are brick, laid to distribute the weight of the earth above them like arches in a cathedral. Some are concrete, and some - like the one in the Roscoes' back yard - are galvanized steel. With most of those pipes nearing a century old, more of the same is inevitable.

Already there's a pop-culture familiarity with dramatic sink holes. The one in the sandbox in The Simpsons Movie resonates because people have something to connect it to - like a famous picture Odeal recalls from the July 10, 1986 Columbus Post Dispatch. That one swallowed a Mercedes Benz. Posters of the front-page story are available for sale online. (You can find a satellite picture of the Roscoes' canyon on Google Earth.)

Though less dramatic, more of the same is visible within a half-mile of the Roscoes' house: Coit Road is blocked off just north of Euclid due to what Water Department Director Odette Clinkscale calls "depressions" in the roadway - signs that a pipe underneath is ruptured and taking away dirt.

East Cleveland is applying to the Ohio Public Works Commission for money to help with that, but it's a competitive process, with every eligible city hoping to get their project funded - and there's not nearly enough money to go around.

With assistance from the Cuyahoga County Engineer's office, the city prepared an estimate for the job. The county sent a technician down a manhole and into the dark tube to evaluate it and shoot video so others could see too. As he approached the location of the sink hole from deep underground, he came to a point where the pipe was caved in and too dangerous for further passage. But he got in far enough to figure that they'll need to replace about 300 feet of pipe, which will cost about $312,000, which East Cleveland doesn't happen to have on hand. So the city had to apply for emergency funds from the state. For cities to get money like that requires several bureaucratic movements.

As Clinkscale says, "It's a lot of red tape. This is government that you're talking about."

Nine mile creek - Likely end of the basketball hoop's journey.

Council had to vote. They had to approve the grant application, and they had to agree to receive the funds. Then the state had to make a decision on the application. Now six weeks have passed, and repair of the pipe has not yet begun.

THE MAJORITY OF THE MONEY the region and the nation invests in buried pipes is to make progress against an EPA mandate to reduce the amount of combined sewer overflows (CSO): the failure of storm and sanitary sewers in heavy rains, resulting in unsanitary waste water flowing into streams and the lake.

The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District was founded in 1972 to begin to manage that environmental morass. To date it's spent $2.1 billion on capital projects. Its operating budget of about $90 million is primarily spent to prevent overflows by digging interceptors - gigantic, underground overflow chambers - and by keeping the pipes clean. Some it cleans with a kind of auger. Others it cleans by blasting in jets of water, then sucking them back out - an urban enema. Some of the pipes are 15 feet in diameter, and cleaning is done with Bobcats and other equipment big enough to drive. Despite these efforts, as Odeal points out, the American Society of Civil Engineers' periodic infrastructure report card gives the nation's sewers a D.

That's because even the EPA's federally mandated CSO cleanup isn't well funded. Frank Greenland, director of capital programs for Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, says a federal program in the '70s used to pay as much as 70 percent of the cost for sewer repairs, treatment plants, interceptors and the replacement of pipes. The grant money was gradually cut back though the Reagan years, and then changed to a loan program. Nationally there's about $23 billion being spent on wastewater improvements - about 50 percent of what a study by the National Association of Clean Water Agencies says is necessary. And these days less than 5 percent of that comes from the federal government.

With every major city in Ohio facing major combined sewer overflow projects to comply, the state has a loan program that was funded at $75 million in 2005. In 2006 it was down to $50 million. Meanwhile, Cuyahoga County alone is facing more than $2 billion in upgrades to the combined sewers.

"In today's game," Greenland says, "we have a dwindling federal investment in the loan program, and that's all you've got. We see increasing investment needs and dwindling federal support."

Odeal says going it alone could leave Clevelanders facing 10- to 12-percent rate increases in their water and sewer bills, for many years to come. And that's not even to deal with pipes like the Roscoes'. The Regional Sewer District is researching the prospect of a regional entity to deal with old and inadequate storm water pipes, but that's a long way off, especially considering the added cost. Greenland and Odeal both say it's inevitable and necessary that a federal grant program be established to help pay for such projects.

"With these problems concentrated largely in the older cities of the Midwest and Northeast," Odeal says, "eventually there will be some kind of grant program. There will have to be. I think it's just a question of time. We have the airport trust fund, a highway trust fund. For years we have been trying to get Congress to create a fund for sewers and wastewater treatment."

In the meantime, very few cities can afford any remediation. Most, as Odeal says, "can only wait for the next catastrophe."

EAST CLEVELAND applied to two state funds to help pay the tab at Roscoe Canyon, and got a total of $271,000 - $41,000 short of the estimated bill. Clinkscale says the city will have to scrape together the rest.

Six contractors took bid packages for the job. Four turned in bids on the project by last Friday's deadline, though they haven't yet been evaluated. The work includes replacing 300 rusty feet of a five-foot-diameter steel pipe with a new one made of concrete. The city is arranging for easements to access the pipe from the seven homeowners whose properties lie over it. She's hoping the work can start in 10 days, or maybe two weeks.

"All the bidders are aware this is an emergency situation," she says.

Don't look down - Marisa Roscoe at the edge of the canyon.

But in the six weeks since the sink hole first appeared, Roscoe has learned not to trust dirt. Take his insurance company. Within the first days afterward, Maria called her insurance company to see if they might get some financial help to deal with the situation. They have a policy. They pay their premiums.

Georgia-based Z.C. Sterling apparently visited the site to evaluate their claim, but Roscoe didn't see them, and they didn't speak with him while they were here. All the Roscoes have is a letter that says they're on their own.

"We have reviewed your claim for a large sink hole located at your property," the letter begins. "You stated that a large sink hole roughly 20 to 30 feet deep and 20 to 30 feet wide has appeared in the back yard next to the garage. As we discussed, sink holes and any damage caused by sink holes are not covered under the policy."

The author of the letter, Z.C. Sterling representative Orlando Hester, then referenced the "general exclusions" of the policy, which describe how the insurance company is not responsible. The language, with references to floods and mudslides, seems to consider the Roscoes' situation an "act of god." Hester did not return several calls for comment.

When the Roscoes initially contacted the insurance company, they hadn't seen any damage to their house or garage, the back wall of which is about 6 feet from the hole. But over time, the dirt beneath the garage - no longer supported by the dirt that used to fill the hole - has apparently subsided and caused cracks to open up in the garage walls and floor. A sidewalk along the back of the garage is beginning to crack and tilt into the hole.

Since the insurance company is leaving him on his own, Roscoe has contacted a lawyer to explore the prospect of suing the city. In addition to any repair costs, he says he's spent money because he and his family are not staying in the house while it's perched 6 feet from the edge of the hole. He hasn't kept track of receipts, but he figures he's spent a couple thousand dollars as they have stayed with friends, family and occasionally at motels.

One thing he can trust is that storm sewers eventually flow to the lake. And that makes an easy illustration of regional interdependence when it comes to buried pipes. Clinkscale says the pipe that sucked down the basketball court leads down hill to Terrace Road, cuts through a park, goes down Coit Road, and heads toward the lake, maybe via Nine Mile Creek, which drains East Cleveland and Collinwood before coming out between the Shoreby Club and a gated condo community in swanky Bratenahl. It's very likely that the Roscoes basketball hoop will travel through all three communities and eventually come out there.

But Charles Roscoe isn't concerned about that. "I just thank the Man Upstairs that no one got hurt," he says.