Singular gradient flow of the distance function and homotopy equivalence

Let $M$ be a Riemannian manifold and let $\varOmega $ be a bounded open subset of $M$ . It is well known that significant information about the geometry of $\varOmega $ is encoded into the properties of the distance, $d_{\partial \varOmega }$ , from the boundary of $\varOmega $ . Here, we show that the generalized gradient flow associated with the distance preserves singularities, that is, if $x_0$ is a singular point of $d_{\partial \varOmega }$ then the generalized characteristic starting at $x_0$ stays singular for all times. As an application, we deduce that the singular set of $d_{\partial \varOmega }$ has the same homotopy type as $\varOmega $ .