Had your fill of potholes? Help is on way, city says
The pothole fillers are out, and they have a lot of ground to cover.
After rain, snow, freezing rain, followed by frigid temperatures, the city of Montreal was experiencing a bit of a thaw Friday and Saturday, and that means potholes appearing on the city’s roads.
Potholes are caused by water infiltrating the road surface, and then expanding when it freezes. As the ice melts, there is a hole left in the ground, explained city spokesperson Marilyne Laroche Corbeil.
Corbeil said 10 specialized trucks managed by subcontractors have been out patching holes with hot asphalt since Thursday.
Added to that are four specialized trucks owned by the city and operated by blue-collar workers.
She said the trucks will continue working as long as temperatures don’t dip too low, and provided that the patching operation doesn’t interfere with a snow clearing or plowing operation.
The roads also have to be relatively dry for a pothole operation to take place, Corbeil said.
While the city is performing this blitz for just a few days, city crews can repair potholes any time of the year if they are severe enough.
Corbeil said the pothole crews will return during the next thaw period.
Corbeil said the city received only half as many reports of potholes this year as it did last year at this time.
Citizens can call 311 to let the city know about a pothole. A new online service to take a picture of a pothole and send it to the city doesn’t appear to be working on the test site of the city of Montreal. Another new technological innovation for keeping track of potholes that have been repaired also appears not to be working.
The city announced at the end of 2016 that it would provide geo-location information for all the potholes that have been repaired, but according to the information on the city’s open-data website, the pothole data was only collected for about a month between December 2016 and January 2017.
The information, therefore, is already a year out of date.