The infamous manhole that’s snarled multiple cars in Mason

WARREN COUNTY, Ohio (WXIX) - There’s a pothole on Mason-Montgomery Road that’s causing more than headaches for some drivers who say they’ve gotten their cars stuck in it.

Now those same drivers are asking city and transportation officials why the broken cover wasn’t fixed sooner.

It resides at the intersection of Mason-Montgomery and Tylersville Road in Mason. Before it was fixed, it lay in wait for unassuming drivers.

“I started rolling forward, and about the time I recognized it was a manhole cover, my front wheel dropped,” said J.D. Bruewer, whose van recently fell into the busted manhole. “Got stuck, and the hole was bigger than the tire, so the entire car just slammed down.”

It happened, according to Bruewer, as he was driving his daughter to school in the morning. The impact of the collision cracked his engine and backed up traffic for miles.

“Suddenly I was stuck for an hour or so, waiting for someone to lift my car out of the hole,” he recalled. “It’s shocking to me that it would happen there [...]because there hasn’t been any work done for a while. Just an old manhole cover that must have been run over one too many times.”

Fellow Mason resident Matt Papiernik drove over the same manhole the next morning, busting his car’s tire and rim and forcing him to call out of work. Papiernik lost a day’s pay.

“Annoyed and frustrated that something like that wasn’t blocked off, or already replaced, and then the process of changing my tire just frustrated me even more,” Papiernik said. “A manhole cover, I feel like, should be a rather quick fix.”

Both Papiernik and Bruewer say they want to see city leaders do whatever it is they can to get ahead of these issues before it costs other families their cars—or more.

“What surprised me, I guess, is that people said it was loose for a few days, and someone said it was open and messed up a half-hour before I got there,” Bruewer said. “That someone from the city isn’t monitoring that, or someone else who saw it didn’t bother to tell anybody.”

Public leaders have not responded to FOX19′s request for comment at the time of this writing.

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