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He got fed up with a Hopewell pothole. So he decided to plant a tree.

Posted at 6:52 PM, Apr 03, 2023
and last updated 2023-04-04 18:02:03-04

HOPEWELL, Va. -- A Hopewell man took things into his own hands after continually being fed up with a pothole.

"It was about a foot deep. It was maybe about that deep. If you hit it at a good speed, it would mess your car up," Josh Anderson said.

The pothole, located at the intersection of South 19th Avenue and Richmond Street in Hopewell, left residents frustrated.

"I mean, it was big enough to plant a tree in it," Samantha Cox, a Hopewell woman, said.

And that's exactly what Anderson decided to do.

"I was leaving to go back to work, I hit the hole. I backed up, filled the back of the truck with dirt, dumped it in there and stuck the plant in there," Anderson said.

Before driving away, he took a couple of photos and shared them on social media. Within minutes, the likes on the photos were adding up.

"It was funny. It was kind of a bunch of people making light of it. It was fun," Blake Cox said.

The views on Anderson's Tik Tok would soon top two million. However, the first tree didn't last long after city workers removed it.

"I come back home from work and the tree was gone. So I pulled up another tree and I planted it, put some lights on it," Anderson said.

Anderson said he complained multiple times to the city about the pothole needing to be fixed.

"As many times as I went to ask to get it done and nothing's been done about it. And as soon as I make a Tik Tok and put it on their web page with a tree in it, within 24 hours, they had a crew out here fixing it," Anderson said.

CBS 6 reached out to the City of Hopewell and they have not responded.

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