Off to dinner last night, it was raining and dark. We headed to a new pizza restaurant and I was keeping an eye on GPS. The road we went down was under some construction and as I approached the left turn driveway, I glanced at GPS and saw I had just passed it. I turned into the next driveway, between two construction pillars, drove in and then, clunk! The front of my car dropped about 8-10"!
In the aforementioned dark and rain, I didn't see that the row of orange construction pillars was there to mark a stretch of pavement/asphalt that was dug out! Essentially it was the opposite lane they had dug up, making the lane I was in a one way. When I turned left into that dug out lane, I didn't see the trench, so my car, a VW Alltrack, was stuck, nose down.
I tried backing up to see if the car could crawl back out, but that just made a horrible scraping sound. After getting out to assess, it seemed the best course of action was to pull forward slowly to let the back end drop into the trench. The other side was essentially flat and, infuriatingly enough, taped off with caution tape!
I inched forward, my wife outside giving verbal cues, and I slowly dropped the back tires off the ledge. There was a minimal scrape and we made it out of the situation in one piece. Luckily, the AT has a little higher clearance than a regular car, but just barely.
In the wet and dark, I couldn't see under the car, but I did find two pieces of plastic that broke off of something. After dinner, upon pulling out of the spot, I didn't see any pools of anything besides water. We made it home fine, no weird sounds, no odd activity from the car. I poked my head and phone camera underneath and aside from a hole in the plastic skid plate, everything looks OK. I'm gonna put the car on my ramps today to take a closer look, but I think we dodged a bullet.
That said, an email will be sent to the city as it would make great sense for them to put caution tape on the side that faces traffic, not just the side on the parking lot.
TL;DR: drove car into unmarked trench, got some damage to my car, seems to be OK.
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| Terrible picture, but there's the ledge we drove off of, no tape to tell that it's there. |
