Actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger went viral with a video of himself going out of his way to fix a troublesome pothole in his neighborhood in Los Angeles, with him and a friend filling the gap with quick-drying cement and covering it with sand. Passing drivers could be seen thanking him as he went about his Good Samaritan act for the city.
"Schwarzenegger, a former two-term Republican governor of California, posted a video of the pair laboring to his 5.1 million Twitter followers," reported The Guardian. "'Today, after the whole neighborhood has been upset about this giant pothole that’s been screwing up cars and bicycles for weeks, I went out with my team and fixed it. I always say, let’s not complain, let’s do something about it. Here you go,' he wrote. In the clip, a driver stops to thank him for taking action, and the actor said: 'You have to do it yourself. This is crazy. For three weeks I’ve been waiting for this hole to be closed.'"
But there's just one problem, reported The Daily Beast: the pothole was not actually a pothole at all.
Rather, according to a spokesperson for the City of Los Angeles, “It’s a service trench that relates to active, permitted work being performed at the location by SoCal Gas, who expects the work to be completed by the end of May.”
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In addition, said the spokesperson, the trench was going to be filled in anyway within a few weeks, as SoCal Gas “will be required to repair” the street as part of the work permit.
While this particular instance was not wear in the road, many American roads are aging as part of the natural end of life of infrastructure — which was the impetus for the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed into law by President Joe Biden. Several years ago, one mayor in Mississippi drew controversy by asking people to heal potholes with the power of prayer.
