Pothole Patrols

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that there’s a pothole every 50 yards or so on some Los Angeles streets. But Alex Padilla has worked as a rocket scientist, and even he had no idea how pervasive an issue the divots would be in his first term as a city councilman.

Padilla grew up in Pacoima. Eventually he went off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then decided to bring his smarts home. First, he wrote software for satellites as an engineer at Hughes Aircraft. Then, after some public sector work, he won his council seat at the age of 26 last year and was appointed to chair the council’s Information Technology Committee.

“There are two sides to what we do,” Padilla said of a councilman’s job. “The meat-and-potatoes side and the opportunity side of legislation. A whole lot of what we do is on the meat-and-potatoes side. There’s not too much technology in our streets and sidewalks.”

If the city repaved all the streets deemed to be in immediate need of repair, that project would be equivalent to a road stretching from Venice Beach to City Hall--in Boston. Potholes in the biggest local street system in the nation--6,500 miles of roads--are consistently the biggest concern for legislators trying to score with the home folk.

While he has kept his focus on enhancing city services in his district, Padilla’s preelection ideas of promoting change through innovative legislation have been put largely on hold. In the 7th District, the northeast San Fernando Valley, people want to know one thing, Padilla said: Can you fill the potholes on my street, Mr. Councilman?

“That’s 90% of what the people talk about,” Padilla said. “During my campaign, I went door to door every day for six months, and the streets were the first thing on people’s minds.”

Padilla has confirmed what everyone else knows. Potholes are the jarring reality checks in Southern California’s love affair with the car, especially after a good rainstorm.

On Barham Boulevard, cracks developed over the last few weeks into full-blown depressions, marking the road like inkblots. The one in front of a flower shop looks like a pair of size 17 hiking boots. Before it was repaired Wednesday, motorists entering the right lane of the boulevard from the Hollywood Freeway had to dodge a squarish hole the size of a spare tire. These conditions mean one thing to drivers: aggravation.

Margaret Lunden drives her white Mercedes-Benz along Barham on her way to work at Warner Bros. Studios. After recent rains, the Benz nearly sank to its fender when it struck a pothole.

“Of course I feel it,” she said. ‘There’s no car that won’t feel a 6-inch-deep hole in the ground.”

Cheap subcompacts and luxury sport utility vehicles alike yielded and briefly bowed with a thud when they met the imperfections on Barham.

Veteran Councilman Nate Holden knows his constituents would just as soon get into a commotion about rocky streets as they would about police corruption.

“Rampart [police scandal] situations are always going to be with us,” Holden said. “One way or another, a manager is always going to be involved in some controversy. But what people are concerned about is their streets.”

Holden has trouble attracting a sizable gathering for district meetings on such policy issues as the City Charter or long-range planning.

“Oh, but let them see a pothole or trash in the street or a mini-mall they don’t like,” he said, “they will demand we do something. Therefore, you fill the pothole so people can see what you’ve done.”

Mini-craters, alligator cracks, lumps of excessive pothole filling and bumpy utility patchwork--anything that makes a car go bump--all get reported to the city’s street services department as potholes. City crews repaired 200,000 potholes last year.

Potholes Treated as Emergencies

According to Greg Scott, director of the Bureau of Street Services, when a complaint comes in about a pothole anywhere in the city, his crews will have it fixed within 24 hours.

“We treat these as emergency situations,” Scott said.

Jose Luis Anguiano works on one of the 24 two-man crews in the city’s pothole patrol. Every morning in the Hollywood area, Anguiano and his partner get a fresh log of complaints from the bureau and embark in their truck to repair as many of them as possible.

When they spot one, they set up their orange cones and get to work shoveling asphalt, which is then smoothed over with a push broom. A week ago they were on Melrose Avenue in the shadow of the Hollywood Freeway, where a series of nasty holes near the right curb had been plaguing westbound motorists. A Monterey Park resident brought the problem to the city’s attention after she reported sustaining a popped tire and bent rim.

“It’s just ridiculous that they let them get like 6 inches deep,” said Bruce Bayton, who works at a hardware store down the street. “They’re big enough for your car to fall in.”

Often, Anguiano said, the team fixes every reported cavity by the end of the day, leaving them time to cruise the streets for others.

At night, patrols drive around looking for potholes.

So with 24 crews during the day, around-the-clock pothole patrols and an emergency response policy, how do some cracks in the road remain long enough to become local landmarks?

Many people, Padilla said, don’t expect the city to do anything about the worn streets, so they don’t ask.

Padilla recently watched a crew patching long-standing chuckholes along the 40-year-old surface of Telfair Avenue in Pacoima. Last week he submitted a proposal to the council to start maintaining a portion of nearby El Dorado Street.

Two tiny sections of the road are privately owned and have never been maintained by the city. It doesn’t make sense, Padilla said, for drivers to enter the paved street, hit a dirt spot, come upon pavement, hit another dirt spot and then be on pavement the rest of the way.

“Anyone who lives within a mile knows about it,” he said. “They wrote it off a long time ago and figured they were never going to get it fixed.”

At one time the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn offered a $1 reward for every pothole reported in his district. He gave out a grand total of $3. Hahn, who was revered by his constituents as well as colleagues, built a reputation for keeping close watch on details down to the potholes in his district while also pushing broader projects.

Hahn was known to take a different route to work every day, searching for flaws in the streets.

Vigilance alone will not smooth the city’s roads. Trying to find a pothole in Los Angeles is like trying to find wood in a lumberyard. Finding the money to fill them is more difficult.

In the past, the city has used budgetary windfalls such as surplus revenue for law enforcement and fixing potholes. So far, Councilman Michael Feuer said, law enforcement is winning the battle for more cash.

“We all support law enforcement as a priority,” Feuer said. “But as we allocate more money to police, we are going to have less to spend on streets.”

A Make-Over Every 65 Years

With $1.5 million allocated for filling potholes and repaving bad roads, the city can resurface about 200 miles of road this year. That could drop to 150 miles next year if the council does not reverse a scheduled decrease. At that rate, city officials said, every failed street in Los Angeles could get a make-over every 65 years. However, the streets were made to last just 25 years.

Some streets, like Alameda, have been on a repair list for more than 30 years. Alameda Street’s number has come up this year. But streets like Central Avenue and many others could have to wait decades.

“We’d better take care of this now while the economy is doing better,” said Feuer, who chairs an ad hoc budget committee that later this year will make recommendations to divide city funds. “You can defer basic quality of life services and infrastructure only for so long before you have a huge accrued expense.”

The street department estimates that it would take $150 million in one shot to resurface all its bad roads and fill all its potholes.

The city’s head of construction material testing, Ricardo Villacorta, says the streets will never be as bad as they are now. As director of the city’s standards laboratory, Villacorta has gotten his hands on some new technology, such as a nuclear density gauge. He expects the gauge and other equipment will help raise the standard for durability of newly constructed streets.

“I can guarantee we will not build any more streets to some of the standards we have in the past,” Villacorta said. “It is impossible. We have the science to know the quality of what we’re putting in before we put it in.”

Up until the mid-1990s, the city bought asphalt from contractors without having precise standards for durability. The street department, Villacorta said, used basic tests and rules of thumb to determine how well a street was constructed and to estimate how long it would last.

Now new equipment being tested by the city and Cal State Los Angeles professor Irving Kett will allow Villacorta to know if a supply of asphalt is likely to crack prematurely. The city can refuse to buy the pothole-prone material.

In the past, “we would only find out later--when the street was full of holes--that they didn’t mix it right,” Villacorta said. “Too late.”

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Times staff writer Bobby Cuza contributed to this story.