Western PA PennDOT Crew Paints Yellow Line Over Dead Racoon

I have posted before about how it’s more prudent to barrel through animals on the road (most of the time) than to swerve to miss them and kill yourself.

Some people didn’t like that idea, but, cmon, although I’d feel kinda bad about killing a squirrel, that squirrel isn’t going to say “Hey thanks for not killing me, allow me to pay for your wrecked car.”

No way. That squirrel is going to laugh all the way to the nut bank.

However, if an animal is dead on the road, they are pretty easy to avoid. Since… they are dead.

The “squirrelly” configuration of a western Pennsylvania road helped cause a state road crew to paint a double-yellow line over a dead raccoon, an agency official said.

Motorcyclist Sean McAfee pointed out the mistake before it could be cleaned up, according to the Tribune-Democrat of Johnstown which also snapped a photo of the painted road kill.

“When I saw it, I almost wrecked my motorcycle because I was laughing so hard,” McAfee told the paper.

PennDOT traffic engineer John Ambrosini told the newspaper that paint crews know to avoid such animals and usually have a foreman on the job to clear any dead animals off the road before the paint-spraying truck equipment passes by. This crew didn’t have a foreman that day, Aug. 2, and the equipment was too big to turn around in traffic on the curvy, narrow road so the line could be repainted without the carcass in the way.

“They did try to stop the paint gun,” Ambrosini said. “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.”

“We were out the next morning to clean it up,” Ambrosini said. Another crew must still return to fill in a gap in the yellow lines where the carcass had been. SOURCE: The Morning Call

The above picture is the actual picture of the poor, dead creature. Hey, at least he can look down from raccoon heaven and go, “Oh, man, humans are so stupid.”

Don’t forget, Musikfest has started and we have tons of prizes to give away in the Musikfest Photo Scavenger Hunt. All you need is a camera.