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| That’s some powerful pee |
On Tuesday (Apr. 25) at about 9:20 a.m. a road sign located in the Urawa Ward of Saitama City, Saitama Prefecture, fell over hitting a 28-year-old female company worker. The woman was taken to the hospital where she was treated for minor injuries to her shoulder.
According to Saitama Prefectural Police, the sign post, which was about 6 meters (19.7 ft) tall and weighed 17.5 kg (38.6 lb) fell over due to a failure at its base. Police think that corrosion caused by the urine of dogs and other factors are to blame.
Police say that the sign post had been inspected earlier this year but no problems were reported.
In 2010 Saitama Prefecture began to replace its sign posts with newer ones treated to be resistant to corrosion. However, the sign that fell over this week had yet to be replaced, despite having been installed in 1992.
In Saitama Prefecture there are roughly 370,000 sign posts, of these only about 7% are the newer corrosion resistant type.
A similar incident occurred in Saitama City in March of 2014. That time a sign post fell over due to corrosion caused by dog urine and scraped the ear of a female second grade elementary school student.
Saitama police have stated that they will make efforts to prevent this from happening again.
If you would like to see a CG recreation of this story, check out the TomoNews Japan video below.
Sources: Mainichi Shinbun, TomoNews Japan
Image: 犬の尿で腐食か 標識倒れ歩行者けが
