Potholes create added winter hazard for drivers
The bone-chilling cold is also causing some spine-rattling rides — and considerable damage — as Windsor roads crack and heave under an oppressive winter blast.
Steve Lutsch said he wasn’t even going that fast when he rolled over a nasty pothole on Wyandotte Street and lost a tire.
“This edge heaving up like that and being concrete, because it tipped a bit, it made a sharp edge,” said Lutsch, who lives in the Riverside area. “It was just a whack, boom. The bang was so hard that I thought it hit the oil pan underneath the engine. That’s how frigging hard it was.”
Lutsch’s bad luck hit Tuesday afternoon as he was westbound in the right lane of Wyandotte Street, just past the Metro grocery store. He had just pulled away from the stoplight at St. Rose Avenue.
“I got a big truck in front of me, I got traffic beside me,” said Lutsch. “All of a sudden that big truck in front of me did this weird bounce. As soon as he went over it, I saw it.” There was no time to avoid it. “I had no recourse,” said Lutsch. “If I were to try to avoid it I would have hit the guy beside it. And boom, it just destroyed my front tire.”
Lutsch said he was luckily only going about 40 or 45km/h because he was behind the truck. If he was going much faster things could have turned out worse.
“It seem like there was an expansion joint that heaved, and it really heaved high,” he said. “About a foot in from that, it cracked and then that piece flipped up even higher. So now you have a sharp edge sticking up.”
Dwayne Dawson, the city’s executive director of operations, said roads do take a beating over the winter. But despite the current deep freeze in the region, he said it’s been a standard winter for road damage.
Windsor spends about $1 million a year fixing potholes. Dawson said that includes thousands of potholes over the winter, but he didn’t have an exact number.
“The frost penetrates into the ground and any moisture in the ground expands as ice,” he said.
“When one part of the road heaves more than the other you get some cracking. The heaved areas can get caught by a snowplough or tires of cars and pop pieces out, creating potholes.”
He said the heaving also happens in spring when the roads thaw out. Dawson said the city learned
about Lutsch’s pothole through social media. Crews were sent out Wednesday afternoon to deal with it. He asked that people call 311 to report road damage so the city can keep a record and fix it.
Lutsch said it was after 5 p.m. by the time he put the spare tire on and got home, so 311 was closed. A friend told him to post something on Facebook. By 6 p.m. Wednesday his post had been shared about 480 times. He brought his car to the shop on Wednesday and learned it was probably a good thing word had been spreading about the Wyandotte crater.
“I’m sitting there waiting my turn because everybody’s hitting potholes, and two of the other patrons in there hit the same pothole,” said Lutsch.
He just hopes that was his last visit to a repair shop for a while. Replacing tires is becoming an annual winter tradition.
“Last year, my wife whacked one pretty good and it cost us a tire and a rim,” he said. “This time it was just a tire but yeah, it did a number on it pretty good.”