It's not easy being a little post office in the rural Catskills. The U.S. Postal Service is forever threatening to cut your hours or shut you down. And as if that weren't enough: Local post offices seem to be weirdly prone to car crashes.
On Wednesday, a pickup truck helmed by an elderly male driver smashed through the front wall of the Hurley post office, shattering glass and knocking the wall off its foundation.
It wasn't the first local car-vs.post-office incident in recent memory. In nearby Big Indian, a woman was arrested in 2012 after she allegedly tried to pin her boyfriend between the Big Indian post office and her 2004 Dodge Neon. When he took refuge in the post office, police say, she jumped out of her car and began chasing him with a pair of scissors.
But the biggest local car magnet seems to be the Margaretville post office, where in 2012, a car smashed entirely through the glass front door of the building and ended up in the post office lobby, giving postal worker Tammy Alvarado the fright of her life. In a news account of the dramatic crash, the Catskill Mountain News noted dryly that it was the third time a car had crashed into the post office.
Are local post offices more crash-prone than other buildings? In the interest of science, we should note that a local bookstore, the Wm. H. Adams Antiquarian Bookstore in Hobart, has been hit by cars no fewer than four times.
