Look familiar? If you spend any time behind the wheel in Colorado Springs, you’ve probably seen hundreds of potholes this spring.

In fact, the city says it has filled 7,400 in the first three months of 2010. In fact, nine crews from the Street Division repaired more than 4,000 in March alone!

Sadly, they are only about halfway done. And that’s only if we don’t have any more freeze-and-thaw cycles, said Ken Winckler, operations manager for the division.

Just about all 109 of the street division staff are involved in patching potholes.

Sometimes, it looks like they are all standing around one hole, watching a single person work. At least, that’s the perception of some in the city.

Reader Frank Rakoczy recently sent The Gazette a couple photos of a street crew working on his street in Rockrimmon and wondered why only two of the seven city employees seemed to be actually working.

Below are Rakoczy’s photos. In the top photo, a city truck pulling a trailer filled with hot liquid tar is visible followed by seven men and a supervisor’s white pickup truck.

The second photo shows a closer view of the crew. One man is bent over, holding a wand that pumps hot liquid tar into cracks in the asphalt. Three men hold large squeegees that they use to push the tar into the cracks and smooth it. Two men perform traffic control and a third is the supervisor, Winckler said.

Winckler said the tar truck was led up the street by a truck pulling an air compressor. A worker walks behind the compressor truck, blowing dirt and rocks out of the cracks before the tar is pumped in to seal the cracks.

Below is a partial view of a map of Colorado Springs maintained by the street division.

The large black dots represent “open” requests for pothole repair the city has received from citizen phone calls and through e-mails to the Street Division Website. Each dot represents one pothole, even if it has received repeated calls for service.

Small grey dots represent filled potholes. 

There are a couple ways to report potholes for repair:

• Call the Pothole Hotline (leave a message): 385-6808
• E-mail: streetdivision@springsgov.com

To learn more about how the city repairs its streets, follow this link to the city’s Web site.

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