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Dangerous swerves! It’s pothole season in the Roaring Fork Valley
Crews tackling typical winter job whenever possible
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Drivers motoring down 27th Street in Glenwood Springs can't always dodge the potholes near the Sunlight Bridge.
Kelley Cox Post Independent
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By Pete Fowler
Post Independent Staff
Glenwood Springs, CO Colorado
February 14, 2008
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GLENWOOD SPRINGS — Fixing potholes isn’t the greatest job a county road and bridge worker could hope for.
“They’d rather be hauling gravel or doing something other than fixing potholes,”
Marvin Stephens joked. “It’s kind of on the lower end of the totem pole as far as what
people would like to do.”
Stephens is the Garfield County road and bridge director.
Fixing potholes is a reality of the winter for cities, counties and the Colorado
Department of Transportation. Pavement and snow freezes and thaws. Moisture gets
into cracks and crevices in roads and, with a little help from automobiles, it pops
chunks of pavement out of roads and highways. Potholes have appeared in force in
and around Glenwood Springs this winter with the heavy snowfall.
“All of us are getting them,” Stephens saiPhoto:17547593,left;d. “(Colorado
Department of Transportation), all the towns. When things start thawing and the water
starts running, we get a lot of traffic and then we start getting the potholes.”
Potholes are worst in the high-traffic areas, Stephens said. His department has gotten
only three or four calls as of Wednesday about potholes on county roads. But he
added, “It’s starting earlier and I believe it’s going to get worse. We still have a lot of
moisture yet to come on the roads where it’s snowpacked.”
CDOT senior foreman D’Wayne Gaymon said potholes appear most where there’s
heavy traffic and turns.
Don Worton, a service advisor for Berthod Motors in Glenwood Springs, said
potholes don’t usually damage suspension components on cars unless someone hits
one extremely hard.
No exact numbers were available, but CDOT has been out filling potholes every day
and has called out workers to fix potholes on weekends for overtime, Gaymon said.
“With the heavy winter we’ve had a lot of potholes,” he said. “It’s one of our highest priorities after clearing snow.”
With six to eight weeks of nearly nonstop snow there hasn’t been much time until now to do anything but plow snow, Gaymon said.
“We’ve had a little harder winter,” said Tom Morelli, an equipment operator with
Glenwood’s streets department. “With the amount of snow and water we’re getting,
we’ve got crews out doing (repairs of potholes) but a lot of them aren’t holding right
now.”
To fix potholes, work crews put down and then compact a mix of asphalt designed to
be used in the cold. But between the freezing, thawing and moisture, Morelli said,
crews often have to fill the same pothole multiple times in a day.
“A lot of them we do a couple or three times a day,” Morelli said.
Gaymon said moisture gets back into potholes, freezes and thaws, and breaks them
out bigger each time.
Morelli said he “wouldn’t even begin to guess” how many potholes the streets
department has filled around Glenwood.
“It’s not that bad, “ Morelli said about the pothole fixing job. “All of us understand it’s
just part of our job.”
He said 27th Street near the Sunlight bridge is one of the worst spots in the city due
to the high amounts of traffic and water on the road. Also, there’s problems
downtown.
“Go over the Grand Avenue bridge,” he said. “There’s potholes all the way across that
thing.”
Morelli, Gaymon and Stephens said everyone deals with the problem of potholes,
and none of the government bodies seem to have it any worse than any other.
“Every municipality, city and county is dealing with a lot of potholes right now
because of the winter we’ve had,” Gaymon said.
Contact Pete Fowler: 384-9121pfowler@postindependent.com
Post Independent, Glenwood Springs Colorado CO
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CLOUDY 32°
