BRATTLEBORO — Potholes. Kettles. Chuckholes. Whatever one chooses to call them, there seems to be a consensus that 2008 will be a year of notoriety for that bone-jarring, suspension-smashing scourge of Brattleboro drivers.
Posters on ibrattleboro.com have described the worst roads as “crater-like,” “war zones,” and “minefields” with Park Place and the Estey St. bridge duking it out for the dubious distinction of “Pothole of the Year.”
Potholes are not as simple as they look. They are caused by a complex combination of factors including severe weather, deferred maintenance, lack of money, and political realities.
This year a severe winter which included all forms of precipitation and extreme cold, in combination with worn roads, has created potholes all over town, with Park Place a particularly bad stretch of road.
The resulting damage is showing up in auto repair shops all over town.
Mike Nauceder, service manager of Monro Muffler & Brake on Putney Road, said the pothole-related damage he is seeing on customers' cars “is probably the worst I've seen it in my six years here.”
“[People] are bending rims, cracking rims, belts have been breaking. This year I've probably done a dozen [tires], where last year I might do one.”
Nauceder said the popularity of low-profile tires and aluminum wheels exacerbates the problem “since they're not made for impact.”
The potholes have also caused exhaust systems to break prematurely and have wreaked havoc on ball joints.
“Probably half the customers I talk to are going to try and sue the town. I don't know if they're just blowing smoke, but they're pretty ripped about it,” Nauceder said.
“We've notice a lot of ball joint problems, tie rod end problems, broken belts and tires bent rims, and certainly front end components,” said Doug Richmond, owner of Richmond Auto Repair.
“It happens every spring but it seems especially prevalent right now,” Richmond said. “Certainly customers have been complaining about potholes and also bringing cars in because they know that that they've hit a pothole really hard and they're worried about it.”
An imperfect world
“If you're really maintaining your road well, you don't let it get to the point where you have potholes,” said Brattleboro Public Works Director Steve Barrett.
In a perfect world that is what would happen. Structurally, the culprit is water, and potholes can be prevented by keeping the roads well surfaced so that water cannot get into the underlying gravel.
But the reality is far from perfect.
“When the road starts to have alligator cracks, starts to show wear, you can put what's called a 'wear coat' over that,” Barrett explained. “You don't have potholes yet but you can see you're going to, and then by doing like a 1-inch or an inch-and-a-half hot mix overlay over the whole road - what you do is you seal all the water out and you build that road up and you protect it. In a lot of cases you can get 10, 15 years of more wear.”
When a couple of potholes appear, they can be patched, but when the road starts to break up, as it did on Park Place, then you need to practically reconstruct it.
Brattleboro Highway Supervisor Al Franklin said there was little that could have been done to prevent this year's potholes, blaming the weather for the severity of the problem.
“The rain we had this winter is terrible for roads. It gets in the cracks and freezes and thaws, freezes and thaws, loosens up the asphalt, and then the traffic pounds them out.”
Franklin said that deferred maintenance plays a role to some extent but that “enormous amounts of traffic” and poor base layers are also to blame, noting that some roads are built over cobblestone.
He said the subsurface of the infamous Park Place “doesn't have a thick enough mat,” making it especially susceptible to potholes.
Sealing them up
The selectboard and town officials are trying to secure money from the state for immediate repairs, but that even without state funding “we've got to do something to seal up the roads, or next year's going to be terrible,” Franklin said.
In the interim, “We've been going out almost every single day that it's not snowing or raining and putting cold patch in them,” but “it's not permanent.”
Franklin said longer-lasting repairs require hot patch, but the Highway Department is “limited on what we can do since the hot mix plants are closed from after Thanksgiving to usually the first of April.”
State funding also plays a key role in the town's ability to keep the roads in good repair. Barrett said that the state routinely contributes about $150,000 in addition to the $200,000 to $300,000 that the town allocates.
Through special allocations, the state pays 90 percent of the costs for major work on its routes, which include Canal Street, Main Street, Western Avenue, High Street, and Putney Road.
The state also contributes to Class 2 connector roads, such as Upper Dummerston Road and the Hinesburg Road. Barret said that the state routinely contributes about $150,000 to the $200,000 to 300,000 that the town allocates.
Barrett said when he was first hired, then–Town Manager Corky Elwell “actually told me that one of the big challenges would be the roadways, and what would happen would be that every 10 years or so [after a bad winter] the roads would really deteriorate.”
Barrett said Elwell predicted that “people would get together and promote supporting the roads,” support that would fade away after major road repairs were completed.
Searching for funding
Barrett recalls a similar outbreak of potholes a decade or so ago on Western Avenue.
“We had multiple cars getting dual flat tires, outrage, and hubcaps strewn all over the place. The same situation as we have on Park Place. So it happens.... If the road's weak and you have a difficult winter, as we've had...it just aggravates the problem more.”
During that crisis there were no state funds available, so the town did a temporary overlay.
“We took a very conservative amount of money and did a three-quarter-inch overlay, just over the traveled portion of the road, and it got us a year or two,” until funding became available, Barrett recalled.
This year, at the end of March, selectboard members went to Montpelier in search of similar emergency funding.
At the invitation of State Senator Peter Shumlin, the board spoke with the Senate Transportation Committee and with Governor Jim Douglas.
“The fact of the matter is the state of Vermont is in this crisis because the federal government has abrogated its responsibility to the state and we're stuck holding the bag,” Shumlin told the Commons.
But because there are similar problems all across the state and funds are limited, Barrett does not feel that the prospects are encouraging.
He said that since the town is responsible for keeping the roads safe, his department may have to “Band-aid” the problem as the town did previously on Western Avenue.
Any driver who feels as though Brattleboro roads are the region's worst should realize “a lot of the bigger towns in Vermont are having the same problem,” Franklin said.
“This isn't just a matter of Brattleboro,” Franklin noted. “It's pretty widespread.”
Franklin said aside from a few complaints, most residents have “been pretty good about it . . .. We're dealing with it as best as we can.”
What are Brattleboro motorists do in the meantime?
Nauceder pointed out that “all it takes is one jolt to break the wall on a tire.”
The mechanic's advice is simple.
“Slow down,” he said.