BECKLEY — West Virginia’s favorite indoor sport of late is watching the feisty Mountaineers prove the basketball “experts” wrong each time they hit the hardwood court. Outdoors, the favorite, albeit involuntary, pastime is dodging potholes.
Relief is coming to all parts of the state, and, in fact, it has begun in many locales now that warmer temperatures are returning.
Mindful of the extensive damage wreaked by one of the harshest winters on record, asphalt plants cranked up three weeks earlier than normal so the Division of Highways could get a jump on the Herculean task confronting them. “We’re out there,” Department of Transportation spokesman Brent Walker said Tuesday. “We’re patching them.”
Just how many potholes erupted in West Virginia’s roadways is hard to determine. “Tens of thousands? Millions? Who knows?” Walker said. “But we’re getting to them.”
This spring, the state set aside an extra $12 million for its winter damage repair program, but just how much will be invested in the pothole recovery is tough to say. “That tells you there’s just more than normal,” Walker said of the added funds to cover pothole repairs.
Normally, asphalt plants don’t have the vital ingredients ready until mid-April. “That’s when we know we’re going to have some consistently warmer temperatures,” Walker said. “They have fired them up sooner than normal just because they know how many potholes, and that doesn’t surprise me. The state is full of them.”
West Virginia Paving Co. has one asphalt plant in Beckley and another in Princeton, and two others are operational in Greenbrier County. By using “hot boxes,” the firm can transport materials in a timely fashion for road crews, Walker pointed out.
Walker described the plan as “shovel and run,” in which a temporary fix is installed, but with asphalt available, the DOH looks for a longer-lasting solution. “We can go in there and dig and mill out a square foot or however big it is,” he explained. “We have three skid steers and have these milling attachments to them. We can cut a square of a rectangle over larger ones, then we pour them and roll them, and it’s a more permanent fix.”
Using that method, the DOH then doesn’t have to resurface an entire lane of traffic.
Plugging potholes is the normal course once the threat of freezing weather passes and usually falls just before warmer temperatures return and the mowing season is launched.
Shovel-and-run patching can last much longer on rural roads where traffic is light, but where there is congestion, the DOH prefers the more permanent repair.
“Shovel-and-run is a temporary fix,” Walker said. “You fill it, and no sooner than you fill it, tires pull it back out. That’s what we do until we’re able to put that permanent patch to it.
“If a county road doesn’t get that much traffic, we can buy more time by putting the cold patch on it. Typically it’s a temporary, tamp-it-down. If there’s not a lot of traffic where it has time to set up, we might get a little more mileage on it. Typically, though, on a primary road, when we do that, there is more traffic and they just don’t last as long.”