Road crew paints yellow line over dead racoon PHOTO
While repainting traffic lines, road crews in Pennsylvania inadvertently laid a fresh coat of yellow paint over an obstruction in the road – the carcass of a dead raccoon.
A motorcyclist, Sean McAfee, noticed the coated road kill on his way home from work and took a photo of the flattened critter covered with yellow paint.
“When I saw it, I almost wrecked my motorcycle because I was laughing so hard,” McAfee told The Tribune-Democrat.
A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation said the accident was unavoidable.
“They did try to stop the paint gun,” traffic engineer John Ambrosini told The Tribune-Democrat. “But with the amount of congestion Thursday, the squirrelly geometry of the road and the size of the equipment, they couldn’t turn around to go back and fix the mistake.”
Ambrosini said paint crews know to avoid such animals and usually a foreman vehicle travels in front or behind the vehicle to remove any obstructions. But the crew didn’t have a foreman that morning, and the equipment was too big to turn around in traffic on the curvy, narrow road, so the line couldn’t be painted without the carcass in the way.
“We were out the next morning to clean it up,” Ambrosini said.
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