  We add a defect line of dissipation, or crack, to the Abelian sandpile model.
We find that the defect line renormalizes to separate the two-dimensional plane
into two half planes with open boundary conditions. We also show that varying
the amount of dissipation at a boundary of the Abelian sandpile model does not
affect the universality class of the boundary condition. We demonstrate that a
universal coefficient associated with height probabilities near the defect can
be used to classify boundary conditions.
