Brickbat: Road Kill

Normally when a road has to be re-routed any utilities in its path get moved. But no one seemed to notice that a utility pole was right in the middle of a new stretch of one highway in rural Quebec, and when the crews doing the work came upon it they just paved around it, leaving it in the middle of the road. It took two months and lots of media attention before the government got around to removing the pole.

Comments

[Whiterun Guard]

Look, they put a reflective sign on it. What more do you want.

Also you've been gone like 5 days, Brickbat, and THIS is what you come back with? Some Yahoo news retread.

I am disappoint.

[db]

They should have plated it with brass and put a Paul Bunyan-sized stripper statue on it and called it a scenic landmark.

[PS]

Stupid Quebecies, they are almost as stupid as stupid Americans, eh.

/Anglo-Canadian

[Fist of Etiquette]

It would have been better if the yellow lines passed on either side.

[Christina]

What I remember for my nearly two years at VDOT, utility relocation is a major part of the road construction process. So much so that an entire department was devoted to it. It can be very expensive. Hay Road in here in Ashburn is a heavily traveled east-west road that will not be widened beyond the existing two-lanes because the relocation cost for the utility poles is too high for the county to stomach paying. Loudoun county has basically taken the tack that developers should do all the road construction, and since there's no more development on Hay, no one will do anything about the road.

[waaminn]

Dude that jsut makes a ll kinds of sense man Wow

http://www.Anon-Tru.tk

[Rich]

Some moderately amusing comments at the link. I liked the one about if people had written in English on Le Pole it would have been taken down by the end of the day.

[aix42]

As it is Quebec they just need to put a Canadian Flag on it, it would not last the day....

[R C Dean]

Reminds me of the famous pic of the road striping crew that put a stripe right over a dead possum. Google that, and you'll find that this has been done to raccoons, god knows what.

[Robert]

Just thinking about how bad that fuckup had to have been. This was probably the only road thru town, so I doubt they closed it completely during work and rerouted traffic to an existing alternate route. Rather, they probably just worked on cutting that corner with the existing turn in place. So not only did a paving crew work around that pole, but also once that route was opened, a crew had to work on relandscaping the previous turn to obliterate it, in full view of the new road with the post in it.

I've seen some awkward and odd placement or replacement of utility poles on streets, and in alleys that sort of thing can't always be avoided, but I never thought I'd see something like this. The funny thing is that in this case it seems that once the pole was relocated, it actually made the path taken by the utility line to be less awkward w.r.t. the road y properties than had been the case previously. Obviously they'd intended to do the work some time, they just didn't schedule things properly, and apparently the workers didn't have an available communication channel to fix that once the problem became obvious.