Brittany Hillhouse was riding a Lime scooter home from a concert with her husband when the scooter hit a pothole on Kane Avenue that neither of them saw coming in the dark. The 42-year-old Milwaukee woman was thrown from the scooter, hit her head, and was rushed to a trauma center with injuries that would require surgery and leave her with screws and plates in her shoulder.
“I might never be the same because of a pothole,” Hillhouse said, according to WISN. She sustained a broken shoulder, jaw and elbow, and doctors operated on her Friday, leaving her with an elbow replacement and a plate in her jaw. She also has a mild concussion from hitting her head when the scooter went out from under her.
Her husband, Brent Hillhouse, described watching the scooter go out from under his wife as she fell. He said the pothole was difficult to see in the dark, and that his wife may never be able to work again as the couple now faces a long recovery. “This should not happen to anybody,” Brittany Hillhouse said, per the same report, adding that she and her husband hope the pothole problem gets addressed before someone else gets hurt.
A Record-Breaking Pothole Backlog
The crash landed in the middle of what has become an unprecedented year for Milwaukee’s roads. In the first eight months of 2026, the city received roughly 24,000 pothole service requests, already blowing past its previous full-year record of 16,804, according to CBS 58. Department of Public Works crews managed to resolve somewhere between 15,300 and 16,000 of those requests over the same stretch…