A 46-year-old cyclist who broke his hand while crashing after riding over a pothole on a Portland street filed a $950,000 lawsuit last week against the city, which has been struggling for decades to scrape together the funds to fix up a historic backlog of cracked, rutted and worn roads.
Dirk Orthmeyer faults the city for failing to repair a pothole that Google Maps shows had marred Southeast Salmon Street near 2nd Avenue since at least March 2022. According to Orthmeyer’s lawsuit, in the following two years that the city failed to fix it, it only “became progressively larger and more dangerous over time.”
According to Orthmeyer’s suit, he had been pedaling past Stumptown Coffee Tasting Bar on the inner eastside of town in June 2024 when a shadow obscured what turned out to be a crater in the road. Orthmeyer went flying, breaking his right hand and suffering sprains, strains and tearing of his tendons and ligaments in his shoulder, hip and pelvis, the suit says…