In Utah County, the road-striping crews don’t stop for anybody or anything … including roadkill.
An unidentified crew was working on Canyon Road through Cedar Hills last week, putting a second coat on the double-yellow line down the middle of the street, when they painted right over what appears to be a dead raccoon.
And, no, it’s not a faked photograph. “It is for real,” said Cedar Hills Mayor Jenney Rees. “A resident shared that photo, and I drove out there to check for myself.”
What she found was, yes, a dead animal that definitely has a yellow stripe painted over it.
“It’s a county road,” Rees said, "so I notified the county that they would have to come back out and touch up the striping.”
The mayor said she'd heard from several people who suggested that striping equipment made it difficult to stop when it encounters some sort of obstruction — perhaps offering some cover for that unidentified road crew. But when Utah County Public Works director Richard Nielson was asked if that could have been the case, he replied, “No, not really.”
“It's just laziness on the stripers' part that they didn't move it out of the way,” he said.
There’s a happy ending. Well, not for the raccoon, of course. But the roadkill was cleared away and the stripes were touched up, Rees said.
