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WILKES-BARRE — We’ve all seen those photos of a ruler sticking out of a pothole.
It’s become somewhat routine. After all, they are out there, them potholes. And they can get deep.
And they wreak havoc on motorists every day.
Cars, trucks, buses, they all find the potholes. Driving along and… BANG! — you get jarred. Sometimes you lose a tire. Sometimes you need a wheel alignment. Sometimes your head hurts from hitting the roof of your car.
If you are alert, which is doubtful since most drivers are too busy texting or dialing their cell phones, you can swerve to avoid the pothole. It does happen. Just hope the oncoming vehicle in the pothole-free lane is not texting.
Thursday morning on North Street, between River and North Main Streets, I pulled over by the Our Lady of Fatima Grotto to watch traffic. At first, I thought I was watching a downhill skiing event or some kind of line dance. Vehicles would swerve to the right, or swerve to the left, or slam right into the pothole.
Thank goodness there were no collisions. Some of the swerving vehicles had to cross the yellow center line to avoid pothole impact. The right swervers nearly went up on the sidewalk where a fire hydrant sat just waiting to be knocked over.
FYI: Potholes form when water seeps into cracks in the roadway and saturates the sub-base. When it freezes, it expands, pushing up and the asphalt surface becomes compromised and the road starts deteriorating.
And vehicles start swerving.
This is not a new phenomenon. Potholes have been around forever. I can remember them when I was a kid. I’ve seen other kids jump into potholes filled with water. If pothole jumping was an Olympic sport, the U.S. would win the gold medal and the pothole jumping team would undoubtedly be comprised of people from Northeastern Pennsylvania.
So, as I watched the swerving on North Street, I wondered when these potholes might be fixed. Butch Frati, the city’s public works director, said potholes are always on the city’s DPW to-do list. As calls come in about pothole locations, crews are dispatched to get them filled. Three crews were patching potholes Thursday, he said.
But the potholes don’t stay filled for long. As soon as it rains or snows and temperatures rise and fall, potholes will open up again and again. And the swerving will be back.
This area has potholes everywhere and we have heard about them coming in all shapes and sizes. Some of the stories are legendary. Like the one where a car got stuck in a pothole. Or the other one about a pothole so large it became a swimming hole.
Make sure you report them. It’s amazing to me that so many go unreported. Drivers who negotiate these potholes on a daily basis — sometimes more than once or twice per day — often won’t report them for some reason. They would rather accept the challenge of remembering to avoid the pothole, rather than see it fixed.
I did a Google search for potholes and discovered that they do exist just about everywhere. Yes, we here in NEPA can bask in the limelight of having the worst potholes around, but we are not alone.
Apparently, in this high-tech world we live in, we can send people into space, we can cook food in a fraction of the time as we used to and we can produce a phone that takes pictures, accesses the Internet and keeps us “connected” — yet we can’t find a way to permanently fix potholes.
Potholes, apparently, can not ever be totally repaired.
Unless we pave the entire road, which as we all know, just isn’t possible in these days of limited budgets, high taxes and unemployment.
Frati told me the Mayor’s Hotline has returned. That will help identify pothole locations, but it sure won’t guarantee a permanent fix.
Over at PennDOT, spokesman James May said people can always call 1-800-FixRoad to report a pothole. Expect the same result. A temporary fix to an eternal problem.
I drove around the city Thursday. I hit plenty of potholes. I managed to miss a few, as well. But they are out there — on nearly every street. They really are hard to miss — literally.
I hear there is a lot of work being done to find a permanent fix to potholes. Good luck with that.
In the meantime, be careful. Look for those potholes. You don’t want to bend a rim or knock your vehicle out of alignment. And please report them. The city, the state or your small towns will fix them — eventually.
In the meantime, watch that swerving.
