The Streets Are Beat, So City Crews Hit the Road

By DAVID REYES

Jan. 5, 1989 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

It’s gotten so bad in Anaheim after the recent rains that the city has inaugurated a three-man, radio-activated “pothole patrol” to help repair the pockmarked streets.

Even before the new crew was launched 2 weeks ago, Anaheim had been responding to numerous complaints about potholes by dispatching as many as 10 repair crews a day, city street maintenance supervisor Louie Vecchione said.

And now, in response to calls from the public, a radio dispatcher is sending the three-man patrol all over the city to hunt down potholes with a vengeance.

“It gets tough at this time of year because we have to handle an influx of telephone calls,” Vecchione said. “But with our new crew dedicated to fixing potholes, we’re going to play catch-up on the ones we have.”

Older Cities Suffer

The pothole problem is not confined to Anaheim. In Westminster, Santa Ana, Stanton--throughout Orange County’s older areas, in fact--street crews have been out in force in recent days, patching asphalt craters that have bedeviled motorists and motorcyclists alike.

The problem, pothole experts say, is threefold in the more urban, aging areas of Orange County: rain damage, increased traffic, and streets that are approaching the limits of their useful lives in the absence of adequate maintenance.

“Deferred maintenance,” a buzzword of the 1980s in cities trying to hold down costs in the face of rising budgets, has, in the case of street repairs, come to mean putting off until tomorrow what doesn’t absolutely have to be done today.

Today, drivers and overworked pothole-patching crews are paying dearly for that strategy.

Yearlong Backlog

“Every time it rains, the pavement starts falling apart, and most cities just go and start patching the holes,” said Santa Ana Police Lt. Hugh Mooney. “When it gets real bad--like if a pothole rips a wheel off a car--we have an officer call street maintenance immediately.

“I drive to and from work on Euclid (Street) in Santa Ana, and there were a whole bunch of potholes--we call them wheel yankers and rim benders--there the other day, and they just fixed them about 2 months ago.”

In Westminster, which has faced one budget crisis after another for 5 years, there is a

yearlong backlog of major street resurfacing projects. That has meant big trouble for maintenance of existing streets.

Said Samuel Matteo, a Westminster public works supervisor: “You have to have a maintenance program. Years ago we used to have an active one. But in recent years we didn’t have the maintenance money, and we got behind.”

Many cities rely to a large extent on outside sources of revenue, such as state and federal funding, for major street repairs, city officials said, and the locals have little control over the flow of that money.

“We’re pretty well limited with our resources,” then Westminster City Manager Murray L. Warden said in an interview last week. Warden, who was fired by the City Council on Tuesday over “philosophical differences,” added: “We’re now looking at a 5-year projection for the city, and one of the main issues is the infrastructure needs help. I’m not only talking about repairing streets and potholes--I’m talking about median strips, parks, buildings and water distribution lines . . . but the money isn’t there.”

Orange County’s roadways are getting older and more frail every year, and they were not built to carry the county’s current volume of large trucks, buses and heavy traffic.

In some cases, road engineers say, city streets built 25 years ago or more are only 3 1/2 inches thick--the standard at the time. By contrast, some new streets are 14 inches thick.

Drainage Problems

“Heck, nowadays we have over half a million vehicles going over some of our streets annually, especially along Bolsa (Avenue) in the tourist section of Little Saigon,” Westminster’s Matteo said.

Older cities definitely have the biggest problems, Christian said.

“The street of the ‘20s, ‘40s and even ‘50s wasn’t built for the heavy trash trucks, the heavy buses filled with people that stop and start each day--or for that matter the heavy traffic we’re now seeing in the county,” he said.

And then there’s the problem of drainage.

“When you get into any older city of size, especially in Southern California . . . the lack of really good drainage in Los Angeles and Orange County gives you a pretty good headache every time it rains,” Christian said.

“Our problem in Anaheim is that we’ve grown by leaps and bounds,” Vecchione said. “The hill areas have grown tremendously, and our future problem for roads is that the hill areas are more susceptible to road damage than the flatlands.”

The alternative to spending thousands of dollars fixing potholes, city officials agree, is spending millions on reconstruction.

Resurfacing one mile of a 60-foot-wide major arterial street with a 2-inch overlay could cost as much as $83,000, the experts say. That is roughly 26 cents a square foot, and that figure can be twice as much for smaller projects.

Meanwhile, the Band-Aid approach to street maintenance--patching potholes--is not as easy as the public seems to think, Matteo said.

A typical crew consists of an asphalt worker, a rake man to level the ground, a barrel or roller worker to tamp it down and sometimes someone to direct traffic, Matteo said.

Half a Day’s Work

“The public thinks we can repair one in minutes, but sometimes it could take half a day,” Matteo said. “To correctly do a pothole, you have to cut it out, fill it in, tamp it down, and put a sealer on it. That’s in dry weather. But in rainy weather we use what’s called a cold patch, an asphalt material that hardens immediately and can be leveled by driving a truck tire over it. It’s fast, but it’s very, very temporary.”

In the world of pothole repairs, there are two unchangeable axioms, Vecchione said.

“Water is asphalt’s enemy, and there’s always the possibility that you can have a perfect road one day and you can get 30 potholes the next day,” he said. “Street repair is an ongoing problem.”

As his next volley in the war on potholes, Vecchione said, he is contemplating an adopt-a-pothole program under which residents would donate money to help pay for street repair and, in return, their names would be inscribed on the street patches.

For those who prefer something for the family room wall, certificates would be issued, too.

WHERE TO CALL ABOUT POTHOLES

Here are phone numbers to call with a complaint about potholes on any street or freeway in Orange County. Caltrans has jurisdiction over the freeways, Imperial Highway, Ortega Highway, Brea Canyon Road and parts of Beach Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. Orange County is responsible for streets in unincorporated areas and some parts of Beach Boulevard, while cities oversee streets within their boundaries as well as the remainder of Beach Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway.

Jurisdiction Phone

Caltrans 639-6682

Orange County 567-6300

Anaheim 999-5176

Brea 990-7650

Buena Park 521-9900, Ext. 266

Costa Mesa 754-5307

Cypress 229-6760

Fountain Valley 965-4493

Fullerton 738-6306

Garden Grove 741-5375

Huntington Beach 848-0600