DelDOT crews turn attention to roads ravaged by winter storms

Though the spring thaw seems to be gaining a foothold across the region, Delaware drivers still have to contend with the dips, bumps, cracks and crevices gouged into streets by the icy hand of Old Man Winter.

Rick Benson, manager of the Admiral Tire shop at the corner of Route 13 and Court Street in Dover, said he sees the evidence of potholed roads every day in his garage.

“It pinches the tires, causes tires to go flat,” he said. “Bump a curb or whatever, it knocks it out of alignment, causes irregular wear in your tires.”

Alignment jobs, which run $79.95 for a passenger car, are a hot item now at Benson’s shop.

The uncommon winter weather and its pavement-crumbling aftermath also has the state Department of Transportation scrambling to patch up the damage.
Mike Williams, DelDOT spokesman, said the three major snowstorms in December and February, combined with persistent cold weather, made conditions ideal for pothole formation.

“It’s the perfect witches brew for creating potholes, with exceptional salt usage, constant plowing and freezing and thawing,” he said.

Until recently, DelDOT crews were working to fill potholes with “cold patch,” a gravel-based material that can be spread without having to be heated like traditional paving asphalt.

Williams said the cold-patching process is labor intensive and slow going, but its all DelDOT can do when the weather is still relatively cold.

“We can load it on the back of the truck, crews will stop and actually take a shovel and take it off the truck and pack it down,” he said.

Along with cold patch, DelDOT deploys self-contained patching trucks. These behemoths carry tanks of warm tar and hoppers full of fine gravel on their backs.

The gravel and tar are fed through a pipe that’s connected to a nozzle on the end of an adjustable arm that sticks out from the front of the rig.

To repair a pothole, the driver pulls up to a damaged area, positions the nozzle over the hole and sprays down alternating layers of tar and gravel until it’s filled up even with the road surface. Then, it’s on to the next chasm in the pavement.

Cold patches and patches laid down by the truck can last for as long as a year or as short as a few months, depending on the traffic load, said DelDOT worker Eric Foltz, who works in a crew that escorts the patching truck on its rounds.

And as weakened street surfaces take more wear, it’s likely more potholes will form, especially at intersections, pavement joints and turn lanes.

“Anywhere there’s a lot of twisting and turning,” Foltz said.

As the weather warms up, DelDOT will get down to making more permanent repairs where necessary using hot-mix asphalt, Williams said.

“We fully expect them to be multiplying out there. We’ll go at them with our winter cold patch and when we can get consistent warm weather and the asphalt plants are back in operation, we’ll do more,” he said.

Williams also said DelDOT will find the money to pay for the pothole repairs that need to be done, even though the agency will have to make some sort of cuts to balance out $6 million in over budget spending for snow removal this winter.

“It’s part of our regular maintenance operations that we do everyday, we don’t have X-amount for potholes,” he said. “I’m not sure if we’ll be able to pinpoint an exact accounting; the funds that we have to run the department are what we use to run the department, and the extraordinary snow removal efforts were part of that.”

Williams said DelDOT might balance its books by cutting back on mowing along roadsides and highway medians, or it might forego the purchase of new parts and equipment that could get by with repairs.

However, he said the snow removal overruns will not jeopardize major road projects that are in progress.

Instead, DelDOT might defer some lower-priority projects, which are prioritized and ranked in lists.

“Things near the end of those lists would just be moved to next year’s list,” he said. “A big job won’t be stopped halfway because of this.”

Email Doug Denison at doug.denison@doverpost.com.