Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 2, 1994 TAG: 9404020073
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Not so long ago, speaking in geological time, the Ice Ages scoured the North American continent, gouging out huge wounds in the landscape.
The Finger Lakes.
The Great Lakes.
Or these potholes on Timberview Road in Roanoke County.
OK, OK, it only seems like these potholes are the size of Lake Erie. But at 2 feet across, they're big enough - especially if it's your front tire that catches one. Lake Erie? Heck, this wooded road near Hanging Rock is pocked with enough of these craters to look like the Sea of Tranquility.
Richard Heslep knows it, too.
"This is minor compared to what's on back in here," the Virginia Department of Transportation crew leader says, as he eases his truck down the winding country road. "We have places where this road just gave way and in wet weather starts pumping mud."
Thunk!
His front tire drops off the pavement.
Thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk!
The other three tires follow.
"This whole section here is gone," Heslep says. "Basically, that's dirt and gravel there. We've put that on there to stabilize it."
St-st-st-stabilize it?
The good news is, on this day, the road's dry, so instead of pumping mud, right now Heslep is just flinging gravel. The bad news is, Heslep's truck is shaking and rattling as if he were bouncing over a cattle guard.
"We're talking a good two weeks, maybe three, to take care of this road," Heslep says, before he meets up with his pothole crew at work. "And that's just one road."
Remember the Beatles' song "A Day in the Life"?
I read the news today, oh boy.
4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all . . .
This is a day in the life of a state road crew. And sure enough, someone has had to count all the holes. Or at least guesstimate them.
The statewide total: The winter of '94 has left behind 3 million potholes in Virginia's roads, about three times as many as normal.
But unlike the Beatlesque variety, they're not small.
"I've been here 22 years and we've never had it this bad," Heslep says. "All that ice and snow, it would freeze by night and thaw back out by day. It's really done a number on the roads."
And don't forget all the salt that state road crews poured on the highways this winter to melt the ice and snow. "Salt is a corrosive," points out Transportation Department spokeswoman Laura Bullock, and it doesn't discriminate. When the salt is through corroding the ice and snow, it's happy to keep right on corroding through the asphalt, as well.
Next thing you know, thunk-a-thunk-a-clang, there goes your hubcap.
Or your alignment.
Or both.
These are boon times for car repair shops.
"We probably pick up an extra 10 or 15 alignments a week" from potholes, says Glen Meador, a mechanic at Brambleton Alignment Service in Roanoke County."Just about any of them will do it. Just depends on how you hit it."
Usually, hard.
That's especially bad news if you're driving a Ford Probe or Chevy Lumina. Or good news for Robert Bessett, who runs Shenandoah Hub Cap Center in Northwest Roanoke. Those models, he says, tend to be the most likely to lose their hubcaps.
"All you have to do is jar it real good," Bessett says. "They like to sail. It doesn't take a whole lot."
But they can cost a lot.
Used hubcaps fetch $25 and up, depending on the model.
Remember when kids used to scavenge the roadsides looking for returnable pop bottles? This spring, they ought to forget about the nickel-and-dime deposits and graduate to where the big money is.
There's not gold in them there hills, but there are plenty of other precious metals.
Heslep remembers driving out Williamson Road - past the duck pond at Friendship Manor - a few weeks back, when a glint of metal in the ditch caught his eye.
"You could see the hubcaps laying around," he says.
So he went back to find the culprit.
Sure enough, there it was. "It wasn't any bigger than this," he says of the pothole, holding his hands apart to indicate its small size. "But it dropped down about eight inches."
It ain't the diameter of the pothole that's the problem, it's the depth.
Heslep patched that pothole himself, but the 2,999,999 others on Virginia's roads will occupy state road crews for months to come - and cost about $34 million, the state transportation honchos figure.
That money will come out of the department's hide, meaning, if the state's busy fixing potholes this spring, it won't be quite as busy building new roads this summer and fall.
With months of potholes still left to do, that also means Jenny Fisher can count on a few more months' worth of angry phone calls.
She's the one who answers the phone if you call the department's Peters Creek Road office. By now, she's heard just about every adjective in the dictionary when it comes to describing potholes.
"There's one guy who keeps calling, telling us there are massive potholes, potholes as big as tables," Fisher says. Problem is, those particular potholes aren't on a state-maintained road. "He wouldn't understand," she says. "He kept yelling."
Guess his pothole wasn't one of the official 3 million.
by CNB