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Whoops! Cementing a bad relationship with Route 31

Palmyra Police were finally able to stop a cement mixer spewing out its load on Route 31 at rush hour on Thursday morning.

What goes splotch, smush, splotch, smush for over a 1/2 mile down Route 31 ( East Main Street ) in the Village of Palmyra during rush hour?

The answer is mixed concrete! Palmyra Police Officer Sherman Yates couldn't help but notice that cars were staying a safe distance behind a cement mixing truck traveling westbound in the Village at 8:09 a.m. on Thursday morning. The officer was taken aback when he quickly discovered why. The truck driver, David Botcher from Plain Street in Newark , had just left the Cleason Cement plant on Route 31 and somehow neglected to notice he had hit the wrong handle on the truck.

As Botcher traveled merrily on his way, cement churning in the back of the huge mixer, the truck was spewing out its load of wet cement onto the highway.

Vehicles behind the truck swerved when possible, others just drove over the mixture, pressing it down in blotches across the road.

Officer Yates finally swung around and was able to sop the cement truck, but not before it had travelled almost a 1/2 mile from the plant.

A snowplow was dispatched to scrape the wet cement to the side of the road, where workers toiled for hours to scoop up the continual 1/2 mile stretch of Route 31

Work crews from the town highway department brought in a snowplow to push the mixture to the side of the road, forming a ten inch wide, 5-6 inch deep continual pile. Crews, including workers from the Cleason Company then began the arduous task of shoveling the stuff into a payloader for disposal.

Botcher was cited for Dispensing Material on a Roadway and Unsafe Load. “He (Botcher) felt real bad about it,” said Officer Yates. No vehicles reported any damage from the spill.