Pothole season

North End

Well, spring has finally arrived, though it seemed like we reverted back to fall here and there with some chilly weather.

How can you tell spring is finally here?

By all the road construction signs, of course — and those dreaded potholes. I just don’t get it. How is it that a lot of the same streets and roads are being torn up and rebuilt every single year? Some of them aren’t even torn up, they just get patched up with asphalt. We all know how long that lasts…

I was driving down one rain-soaked street and — BOOM — it seemed like I hit something in the road.

Turns out, I hit one pothole that was so deep with sharp edges that it actually flattened both tires on the driver side. It was after a huge rainfall and the street was full of water so I wasn’t able to see it. By the time I got to the end of the street, the tire sensor indicated that the front tire was low. I promptly pulled out the donut spare tire and took off the flat front tire.

Ten minutes later on the drive home, the tire sensor lit up again. I got out to check and saw that the rear tire was really low. Instead of driving home, I dropped the car off at the garage a few blocks away from home. The garage was closed as it was around 10 p.m., so I left a note and put the key in the drop box.

“Oh, well it could have been worse,” I thought. “I could have been in the middle of nowhere.”

Then again, I haven’t come across big potholes like that in the middle of nowhere, at least not on the highways.

The garage owner called me in the morning with the bad news: both tires were trashed as they got torn up on the sidewalls. I had to buy two new tires. I drove down the same street a few days later when the water had cleared and couldn’t believe the size of this pothole. It was HUGE! It was almost the size of a kid’s swimming pool.

OK, I may be exaggerating a bit, but it was about three feet long by about two feet wide by about six inches deep.

This happened about a month ago, and I would drive down the street here and there. About three weeks after this mishap, the city finally put two orange pylons into the pothole. Then about a week after that, they finally fixed it.

I don’t understand why these potholes show up every spring. A fellow I talked to who worked in the concrete industry for some time mentioned that the concrete mixture they use isn’t very conducive to our harsh winter climate. He also mentioned that patching with asphalt also is only temporary.

What is the solution? All I know is that, once the potholes start blooming in the spring, that construction season… errr… summer is on its way.