Mountain View County staff have been struggling with the recent precipitation during the spring thaw, dealing with countless potholes and heaves, say officials.
“The potholes are huge this year; they're causing disturbances to drivers,” said Ryan Morrison, assistant director of operational services for the county.
His seasonal term staff started on May 5, and so currently operational services staff are putting together a plan to figure out the best way to attack the issues, while already working on some of the roads in more dire need, he said.
“Our number 1 thing is to go out and start patching holes in the chip seal and roads,” he said.
Simply put, it's just been a bad year for potholes due to the amount of moisture both before the thaw and in recent weeks, he said.
Even the county office has seen its share of woes, needing to bring in contractors to grind down the sidewalk around the building because the ground underneath was heaving so badly, he said.
“It's just one of those years where we're going to have a lot of potholes and heaves, and hopefully we get some more warm, dry weather and we can get it behind us and get some of the moisture out of the roads and let it all settle out,” he noted.
“As far as the county's preparedness, we did put up 800 tonnes of pothole repair mix at our pit and our plan is to try and get it out there as fast as we can.”
They will be conducting repairs on an as-needed basis moving forward, and have already been out patching certain spots on some of the main arteries in the county, he said.
“The crews were out on Range Road 20 between Olds and Didsbury (last week) doing some repairs and pulverizing some of the sections of roads that are really potholed badly,” he said.
The public should be cautious during this time and slow down, keeping aware of signs notifying of rough stretches of road, as well as just keeping an eye out for hazardous potholes, he added.
“A road that might have been smooth last week might have a large hole in it this week,” he noted.
Crews are also planning to take to the gravel roads in the county eventually, although the roads have to dry out before staff can bring a grader onto them, he said.
“We're hoping that by the May long weekend, we should have most of them bladed up but right now they're pretty soft for us to put the heavy graders onto them – if we go out and grade them it might cause just as much of a mess as if we didn't,” he said.
There are currently about 20 term staff that will be doing pothole patching and nine graders working on the gravel roads. There is other staff on hand, but they will be mostly driving trucks, hauling gravel and taking down snow fences, he said.
Because some of the term staff members had prior experience, they can use that experience to predict which roads are going to go bad first, and which ones should be done first as well, he added.
The public basically has to be aware that some of the roads are not in the best of shape, he said.
“And we're working our hardest to get them fixed. This is Mountain View County. This is what spring entails for us,” he said.
