Road crews attacking potholes

By Tom Purdom
Staff Writer

MILAN — Milan and Grants have started an aggressive program to get the potholes in area roads fixed."It's an ongoing problem, but we've got to get them repaired as soon as possible," said Ben Chavez, supervisor of the Milan Street Department. Chavez said residents will call in to Village Hall to complain about them, or his street crew will spot them while driving around town on other business.

In Grants, Sikey Montano, street department supervisor, said his street department crew picks a couple of days a month to drive around Grants looking for potholes. "It is an ongoing process," Montano said.

Chavez, meanwhile, said no road is immune to potholes.
'The most common way for a pothole to be created is by moisture. Until this year, communities in the Southwest generally did not have to worry about rain and moisture because there simply was not much. This year, there seems to be a great deal more moisture, and the summer rains, also called the monsoons, have not even hit yet.

All roads are subject to cracks. Some of the cracks in the asphalt look like what road crews call them, alligator cracks.

When it snows or rains, moisture sinks through the cracks in old or weakened asphalt. The moisture is soaked up by the roadbed which is a mixture of rock, gravel and sometimes sand supporting the road.

As vehicles are driven over the roads it forces water through the soggy roadbed and that leads to an eventual weakening of parts of the roadbed.

Continued driving over the weakened roadbed vibrates the asphalt into chunks and eventually the vibration of the tires cause the chunks to come lose and potholes are formed.

Potholes are normally about 12 inches in diameter, but in some instances where large trucks are driven over the area, the potholes can become much, much larger.

"Even the salt used to give traction to cars in snow and ice can help lead to pothole problems," Chavez said.

The major culprit, though, is rain. "That's why you see more potholes in streets after it rains," Chavez said.

With more of the big trucks rolling through Milan, that community sees larger potholes. The ones in Grants average about 12 inches in diameter, and while the ones in Milan are pretty much the same size, there are a few which are much larger. "I've seen them six to seven feet across and two or three inches deep," Chavez said.

Both communities' street department workers use a hot mix to repair potholes. "We keep it at the yard," Chavez said. A street crew member simply takes a shovel-full of the stuff, or however many shovels of the stuff it takes to fill the hole and then compacts the hot coal mix down. "Compacting it makes the stuff hard," Chavez said.

Montano said repairing potholes in streets is not high up on his list of fun things to, but it is a necessary part of keeping a community mobile.