Bottomless pit of potholes

Yes, it’s worse than years past. And the solution is in your hands

Friday, March 11, 2022, Vol. 46, No. 10
By Joe Morris

Potholes are the great leveler. They waylay Toyotas and Teslas alike, without thought to age, income or educational attainment. In a divided world, they are a uniter for focused hatred. And around Nashville and elsewhere in Tennessee they are spreading like misinformation on social media.

So, who’s going to fix those craters? It’s complicated.

First note that not all roads are created equal: Side streets are solely the domain of local government, in Nashville’s case the Nashville Department of Transportation and Multimodal Infrastructure.

Larger arteries – think Charlotte or Gallatin pikes in Nashville – fall under the Tennessee Department of Transportation.

And the interstates? That’s the federal government, although TDOT contracts for some of the repair and maintenance work.

In other words, who fixes it all depends on where the pothole is. How and when it gets fixed depends on a few other factors.

The good news? There is no turf war in the pothole-repair community. All the entities involved – city and state – have wide-open lines of communication, they say.

Metro Nashville operates its hubNashville service (https://hub.nashville.gov), where residents can get information and services and report issues such as potholes, which even have their own page.

TDOT also has a reporting mechanism on its website (www.tn.gov/tdot/maintenance/potholes.html) for overachievers who want to double-report, just to be on the safe side. If your pothole report to hubNashville is a state road, the information will be shared with TDOT, and vice versa, so that nothing gets missed, says Sissy Muro Juarez, social media and content strategist for NDOT.

“Someone can use hubNashville to report on any roadway issues,” Juarez says. “If it’s West End Avenue, their own street, Briley Parkway, whatever, it’ll get routed to the right agency. When the customer service representatives get that request, they know where to send it. And if you use hubNashville, it will GPS code the site for you so that the location is already tagged.”

In a year like 2022, that’s a lot of routing. For instance, when the hubNashville customer service team reported to work the Tuesday after President’s Day, they had more than 1,000 requests waiting. They tackle them one at a time and work through the list, Juarez says, with the goal being a same-day turnaround to get the info where it needs to go.

Bumper crop of bumps

Speed is of the essence, or any Tennessee city will drown in requests.

In February alone, Metro crews filled 5,393 potholes, an increase of almost 2,000 more than the same period last year. The uptick is due to a perfect storm of, well, storms – both the rain and snow variety – along with colder temperatures and the well-documented daily rise in Nashville’s population.

To put it another way, weather swings and more car/truck traffic equals more than even the toughest asphalt can bear. Cracks allow for water seepage, which breaks up the asphalt at and below the surface. That loosened material is carried away by water and wheels.

Given the heightened competition for their attention, agencies tasked with repairs wish for everyone to know that they do not play favorites. Nor do they triage repairs based on a hole’s size – with the key exception of a sinkhole, which usually involves storm drains or water pipes and brings in other teams. They attack all offenders with equal zeal, says Cody Osborne, NDOT operations manager.

“We think of any hole as a pothole, and if you see it, we want to hear about it,” Osborne says. “Most potholes are only around 2 inches deep, but when you hit one it still feels like you’re going into an abyss.

“Whatever the case, when we get the report, an inspector will come out and look at it and determine what our options are for the repair.”

For smaller incidents, that means dispatching a patch truck. Metro has four of them rolling on any given day. Each truck has a three- or four-member team (one of which styles itself the “Band-Aid Crew”), including a flag operator to help with traffic calming.

If the issue is beyond what they can handle, a specialized truck with lasers and a burner mechanism will be sent instead. The laser grids the area, and then a large metal square with burners affixed will drop down and heat the asphalt. Once that’s done, the now-malleable mix will be respread and tamped down.

And if there are already patches, or the whole street is a crazy quilt of repairs? Then it might be time for repaving – but that’s a decision for Metro’s road engineers, not the paving and repair crew. They, too, are scouring the roads for issues, Juarez adds.

“We have a truck that’s outfitted with sensors like the Google Maps car,” she explains. “Davidson County is divided into six sections. Each year it drives around three sections, or half the county, and the next year it gets to the others. When those reports come back, then the status of each road can be assessed to see what needs repaving. From there a list is made, and the work begins.”

There’s no set timeline to go by, Osborne adds.

“We have no way to say, ‘this patch means we are good for five years, or this paving will last for 10 years.’ There are too many variables. What we do want people to understand is that pothole repair is not a quick fix, not something we’re doing to save money instead of repaving, but a regular, normal part of overall road maintenance and repair.”

Unwelcome harbinger of spring

There’s another wrinkle: A summertime pothole might get fixed quicker than a winter or early spring pothole. That’s because to everything there is a season, and for potholes that’s January through April, as warmer weather approaches. Hardy perennials pop up year-round, but this annual window is a particularly aggressive growth period, Osborne says.

“This year has been very high due to all the snow and ice, and then the cold,” he says. “That’s bad for roads, and it’s bad for already-patched spots. We say that for us, April showers bring May potholes, even though it’s been more like January and February in 2022.”

A welcome piece of news is that all the new construction around town comes with a price tag if roadways are tampered with. Metro issues permits for builders who need to cut into roads, Osborne says, and then follows up once the building is done.

“We come in behind them to look at it, and if they didn’t put things back to how they were before, or otherwise leave it in a bad state, then we know who to go to and we will get them to fix it.”

Bigger roads, bigger headaches

Like Metro, the state has teams of inspectors and repair crews out surveying and fixing all year. They, however, are tasked with anything from issues along a state route that runs through an urban area, such as Lebanon Pike (also known as Tennessee State Route 24 and U.S. Route 70), to other state routes and, in partnership with the federal government, interstate highways – three of which converge in Nashville and are seemingly always in need of repair.

“We have a resurfacing budget that is earmarked from the state Legislature, and all the money we spend on the interstates is reported back to the state, which in turn gets funds from the federal government through an 80-20 split,” says Nathan Newberry, Region 3 transportation manager 1 with TDOT, whose coverage area is 26 Middle Tennessee counties. “State routes are all state dollars, unless they fall under another umbrella program with the federal government.”

The state also is dealing with size and scope issues. Unlike Metro Nashville patching projects, which often can be done in less than a half-hour, many of these heftier interstate jobs are measured in years.

If it’s less about patching and more about repaving, the timeline from assessment and evaluation to funding to completion, not to mention project complexity – think new bridges, storm sewers, rerouting of current roadways – can stretch into the decades.

When it’s a local road, however, such as Charlotte Pike (also part of State Route 24), the job gets a little easier. Like their Metro counterparts, TDOT teams respond to requests submitted via the website or through another source such as hubNashville by assessing if it’s an immediate problem to correct or if it can be worked into a current repair plan.

“TDOT has taken a really firm stance on safety, and so we now have a process to keep both drivers and our crews safe,” Newberry adds. “We don’t just send out a couple of guys out with 10 bags of cold-mix asphalt in the back of a truck to fix a pothole on I-40 West in Nashville. Our operations have different sizes and complexities, and so we evaluate everything to keep everyone safe.”

This also means looking at the hole’s size as though they were on a motorcycle. Those riders are the most vulnerable to any size hole, Newberry says, so they are a starting point for evaluations.

“The litmus test I use is, ‘Is this going to throw someone on a motorcycle off if they hit it?’ If the answer is yes, and that is the case most of the time, then we know to get that one worked on right away.”

Timing is everything

Both state and local crews must honor the calendar when it comes to asphalt. From mid-fall through the end of winter, crews are forced to use cold-mix asphalt, which is premade and bagged for storage, to make pothole repairs. That’s because the asphalt vendors they contract with are closed when daily temperatures slump below an average of 50 degrees.

Plant operators then spend those dormant months making repairs to their facilities and getting in the raw materials needed for the next year’s roadwork.

Hot mix is very much preferred to cold mix, Newberry says. That, plus the fact that when it’s gone, it’s gone, means that most repairs tend to happen during the warmer months.

“You always want to use hot mix,” he explains. “Holes patched with cold mix have a tendency to pop out due to moisture saturation in the winter months. It’s just not as effective. We do order a lot of cold mix and have that ready for when holes pop up when it’s cold, so they don’t have to wait.

“Even so, it’s good if people understand that the primary schedule for a hot-mix asphalt plant is the second week in March until the end of October. We get hit hard in years like this when we have a lot of work to do outside that window, because our stockpile of cold mix is exhausted.”

That’s made things tough in a winter that Newberry says is probably the worst he’s seen in his 16 years on duty.

“Nine times out of 10, we have a huge pothole outbreak when those plants are closed,” he says. “This year has been one of the worst, from the frequency to the overall number of inclement weather events we have had.

“When pavement gets cold, it gets harder. When it gets harder, it gets more brittle. And as you run more cars and trucks over that brittle surface, it causes degradation. And as the road degrades water gets in and freezes and blows out potholes.

“That doesn’t even factor in when salt gets put down. People tend to think that snowplows do damage to roads, but it’s really the salt.”

Despite the challenges, pothole repair crews are a dedicated lot, work in all conditions. They are as eager to get the work done as commuters and travelers are to having it done, Newberry acknowledges.

“Everybody’s on edge right now, waiting for the asphalt plants to open back up,” he says. “If they do, contractors who are doing paving are going back to work, and we’re getting hot mix again.

“We need a warmup, and it’s coming. We’re chomping at the bit to get back to those plants and get trucks full so we can fix everybody’s potholes.”