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Photo: Pothole Tries To Eat Pothole Repair Truck

Ka-thunk. This pothole repair crew in East Lansing, Mich., met its match.
Robert Boomer
/
Facebook.com/bikerboomer
Ka-thunk. This pothole repair crew in East Lansing, Mich., met its match.

There's just something oddly appropriate about this photo from East Lansing, Mich., after a winter that's been so hard for so many people across the nation.

It seems that "a patching crew who went to fix a pothole on Harrison Road on Monday ended up with a much bigger hole to fill when a portion of their vehicle fell through the pavement," the Lansing State Journal writes.

Robert Boomer, a mechanical engineering student at Michigan State University, snapped the photo and posted it to his Facebook page. It's now gotten a fair amount of attention on Reddit and several news sites.

The State Journal says the truck dropped into the hole as it was backing up. Both the truck and the driver were OK afterward.

As happens each spring, potholes are a popular topic in the news. But it feels like they're even more notable this year:

-- "2014 Shaping Up as an Epically Bad Year for Potholes." (Time.com)

-- "Mayor, city leaders call road conditions an emergency." (Fox21News in Colorado Springs, Colo.)

-- "Potholes taking a toll on vehicles this year." (The Boston Globe)

-- "It's Pothole Season In North Country." (Fox28 in Watertown, N.Y.)

-- "Hoboken residents furious over potholes, state of city streets." (NJ.com)

-- "Potholes and Big Data: Crowdsourcing Our Way to Better Government." (Wired.com)

(H/T to NPR intern Lauren Katz.)

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.