Five months after a bike cop wiped out on this pothole, it's unrepaired

*Five months after a bicycle patrol officer rode into this pothole, it remains unrepaired. | CWBChicago photo*

A Chicago police officer was injured five months ago when he accidentally rode his bike into this pothole near Boystown during a nighttime patrol.

Now, you might be thinking the city would expedite the repair of a pothole that caused one of its police officers to go flying from his bicycle.

And you’d be wrong.

As of Thursday morning – almost exactly five months after the officer’s injuries – the long, narrow, and deep hole remains in place. And it’s growing.

Oh, to be sure, the city did send someone out shortly after the officer crashed. They placed a traffic barrel and a bollard over the hole.

*Taken hours after the officer was injured, this photo shows traffic devices that city workers placed over the hole. The barrel is still there, but the bollard is not. | Provided*

The traffic barrel is still there. The bollard is gone.

An observant neighbor noticed the hole this week and posted about it on Lakeview News Uncensored’s Facebook page.

“This puzzles me….How is this still like this?” the man asked.

Around 11:15 p.m. on July 8, a 19th District bicycle patrol team was traveling westbound on the 600 block of West Addison when his front tire fell into the hole, a CPD spokesperson said at the time.

The officer was thrown from the bike and had to be treated at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center. His bike was heavily damaged, the department said.

*Seen in July, the hole was about a foot wide, at least three feet long, and about three feet deep. | Provided*

Within 12 hours, city workers placed the barrel and bollard over the hole.

And then, nothing else happened.

“I live in front of it,” another resident said on Facebook. “It’s puzzled me for sometime.”

In July, an officer at the scene said the pothole was a foot wide, more than three feet long, and up to three feet deep.

When a CWBChicago editor visited the site this week, the hole was just as wide, just as deep, and even longer.

We could not find any work order to repair the pothole in the city’s pothole database. And no pothole repair has been made on the 600 block of Addison in the past year, according to the Department of Transportation’s pothole tracker.

Following an inquiry from CWBChicago on Thursday, 46th Ward Ald. James Cappleman’s chief of Staff Tressa Feher said her office would immediately open a ticket for repair with the Department of Water Management.

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