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Neither rain, nor snow, nor dead raccoons can stay the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's painters from their appointed rounds.
Therefore, when a crew arrived earlier this month to stripe center lines down Franklin Street in Johnstown, it was not going to let anything stand—or lie dead—in its way.
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Josh Byers / Reprinted with permission |
Which would explain the fresh double yellow lines that soon adorned the back of a raccoon that had met its demise earlier in the painters' path.
“When I saw it, I almost wrecked my motorcycle because I was laughing so hard,” Sean McAfee, of Johnstown, told the local Tribune-Democrat.
The Perils of ‘Squirrelly Geometry’
How did the critter get his new coat? Blame the road’s “squirrelly geometry,” says a PennDot traffic engineer.
District 9’s John Ambrosini said that a foreman vehicle usually accompanied painting vehicles to remove obstructions, but none did so on Aug. 2, when this crew hit the road in Johnstown.
“They did try to stop the paint gun,” Ambrosini told the Tribune-Democrat. “But with the amount of congestion Thursday, the squirrelly geometry of the road, and the size of equipment, they couldn’t turn around to go back and fix the mistake.”
Clean-up Crew
PennDOT did not respond Thursday (Aug. 9) to a request for more information, but Ambrosini told the local paper that the mess had been cleaned up the next day.
The lines, however, were not immediately repainted, leaving a bare spot in the road for now.
Ambrosini told the paper that crews painted over obstructions “pretty frequently.”
He added: “Painting the yellow lines over the existing lines is not easily done.”
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