Street crews try to douse pothole hot spots
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By ROD STETZER rod.stetzer@lee.net
Saturday, March 15, 2008 9:25 PM CDT
Glen Zwiefelhofer takes the shiny oily material and molds it in his hand.
It’s expensive stuff, selling for $60 a ton, and leaves behind a black stain on his palm.
But when used right by Zwiefelhofer’s street department crew in Chippewa Falls, the pliable oil patching material can save you and your car a trip to a car shop for costly repairs.
Welcome to pothole season, the time of year when a road’s surface can be smooth one hour and become an obstacle course potmarked with holes the next.
Here’s the pothole hot spots in Chippewa Falls as of last week: Mansfield Street, Central Street (near the Northwestern Bank), Park Avenue (from Woodward Avenue and Mall Drive); and River Street (from Bay and Superior streets).
Those potholes will be plugged up with the street department’s reserve of what’s called winter patch, a pliable oil that’s mixed with pea gravel.
Last winter, the street department used 15 to 20 tons of the stuff. This year, Zwiefelhofer said the street department will use 50 tons.
“It doesn’t have to be heated to be used,” said Zwiefelhofer, the city’s street superintendent.
Some may consider this to be a harsh winter, especially in light of relatively mild winters the last two years.
But it’s not a winter’s harshness that is a critical factor when it comes to creating potholes, said Zwiefelhofer.
“It’s the freeze-thaw of the moisture of the snow that’s fallen,” he explains.
For example, early January had warm days when the moisture seeped down into the pavement. Then that moisture froze, only to melt again when warmer temperatures arrived. That causes stress on the pavement, and a pothole is born.
There are other contributing factors, of course. If a street is flat, it will have more potholes. That’s why streets usually have crowns, so the water drains away.
The heavier the snowfall, the harder it is for a plow to get snow into the curb and gutter. You wind up with more moisture on the road, moisture that can later contribute to a pothole.
“The condition of your streets do have a direct effect,” Zwiefelhofer said.
That’s evident on Mansfield Street, where potholes are popping up. “As streets age, more potholes appear on them,” Zwiefelhofer said.
That’s why Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz told the Wisconsin State Journal about his pothole solution: “The real answer is to rebuild streets.“
In Mansfield Street’s case, that’s planned to happen this year, Zwiefelhofer said.
Other than rebuilding a street, the best fix to a pothole starts in May, when hot mix becomes available.
“We try to use more permanent fixes on the real bad (potholes) as time permits in the summer, and then we use hot mix,” Zwiefelhofer said.
Until then, the city street crew will have to use its winter patch, which sells at nearly twice the amount of hot mix. The added cost is due to the special oil that’s used, an oil that doesn’t freeze.
The city buys its supply of the winter mix from Chippewa County, but have enough on hand this winter to get buy without buying more.
Zwiefelhofer said city crews follow this procedure to fill a pothole:
- They sweep moisture out of the hole:
- Using LP torches, they heat and dry the hole. “The warmer you can get it, the better it is going to stay,” Zwiefelhofer said, although heating is not necessary for the winter patch to work.
- Then the winter mix is placed in the hole.
Zwiefelhofer said deeper and larger potholes hold the cold mix material in place better than small potholes.
If you don’t want to worry whether the pothole you hit is large or small, you might want to follow these tips from AAA Wisconsin:
- Make sure your vehicle’s tires have full air pressure. That gives you more of a cushion between the pothole and the tire rim.
- Check surrounding traffic before swerving around a pothole.
- If you can’t avoid a pothole, slow down. Slower speeds decrease the chance of damage to tires, wheels, shocks, struts and springs. But avoiding braking directly over a pothole, which causes the weight of the car to shift to the front and increases damage.
- Look out for water, as it may be covering a pothole.
Reach Rod Stetzer at rod.stetzer@lee.net.
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