COPING WITH THE STORM’S AFTERMATH : Pothole Patchers Try to Keep Pace as Hot Line Rings : Heated asphalt won’t adhere to wet pavement so repairs are temporary and repeated. Story is the same in city after city.

Don Boynton has had a bad couple of days.

As acting street superintendent of Costa Mesa, part of his job is to answer calls to the city’s pothole hot line, a phone that ordinarily rings about once a day. But as rain continued to hammer the city, the daily calls rose to about 15, throwing Boynton and his staff into a tizzy.

“It stretches us,” he said. “We end up fixing the same holes over and over in the rain.”

The reason? Hot asphalt, Boynton explained, will not adhere to wet pavement. So until the ground dries, the best his crews can do is apply temporary asphalt fillings, a task made even more difficult by the fact that most asphalt companies close during storms.

As a result, Boynton said, “a lot of people’s patience wears as thin as mine. They just don’t understand why we can’t fix a hole and get it to stay.” So answering phone calls, he said, “gets tedious and a little disappointing, because you know that you really can’t tell people what they want to hear and make them happy.”

It was the same story in city after city Monday, as the driving rain continued for the third straight day.

Cypress was reporting about six new potholes a day, up from the usual two every six months. In La Palma, work crews patched about 25 holes over the weekend compared to the usual eight. And maintenance people in Buena Park were working overtime to apply 55 bags of patching material to about 30 potholes.

“I bought 9,000 pounds of mix last week and on Saturday we ran out,” said Rudy Cisneros, the city’s street superintendent. “This is one of our worst years for potholes. I don’t remember a year this bad.”

Most streets in the county are composed of several layers. Generally, a dirt bed is covered by a rock base of six to 12 inches composed of sand and pebbles. Above that is the six-inch roll of asphalt.

As the asphalt ages, the oil in it begins to dry out, causing cracks on the surface. Rain seeps into the cracks, weakening the road, and as cars press down, the cracks widen into the huge holes that can flatten tires, bend wheels, ruin alignments, damage shock absorbers and occasionally even cause accidents involving injury or death.

Most Orange County cities on Monday reported no injuries and only minor damage related to potholes. In Costa Mesa, two drivers called the city to complain that their cars had been thrown out of alignment by potholes, Boynton said. And Newport Beach officials reported some minor damage to cars, including several blown tires.

Some cities had extra crews working overtime. Others, such as Huntington Beach, didn’t answer the phones at all Monday, when offices were closed for Martin Luther King’s birthday. And officials in several cities said they were sending crews out on regular street inspections to spot and repair potholes before they became problems.

“We’re trying to take care of things before they happen,” said James Sharp, the assistant street superintendent in Fountain Valley, where crews used about four tons of material over the weekend to patch 150 potholes, including some that were three feet long. “We prevent instead of react.”

Back in Costa Mesa, meanwhile, acting street superintendent Boynton was doing his best to help out during the intervals between incoming phone calls. City maintenance crews were so short-staffed, he said, that occasionally that meant grabbing a shovel and hitting the streets himself.

“We’re out there every day and every night to do the job,” said Boynton, 42. He paused. “Actually,” he said, “I think I’m getting a little too old for this stuff.”