Pothole Filler Really Digs His Work

Robert Caudillo used all of the strength in his powerful arms to shove the teeth of a dull steel rake across a mound of steaming asphalt.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, pushing the rake through the sticky black nodules piled high in a Koreatown pothole, “it’s heavy.”

Caudillo, 48, has been filling potholes for the city of Los Angeles for 25 years.

It’s a calling that has drawn him since he was 16 years old and stumbled on a pothole crew fixing the street in the Temple-Beaudry neighborhood where he grew up. “I saw those guys and I thought, ‘That seems like a pretty good job,’ ” Caudillo said.

The work has increased since heavy storms began in January. The city’s crews have been trolling for potholes seven days a week and filling them up with fresh asphalt.

“All potholes. All the time. All day long on my shift,” Caudillo said.

Since the storms started during the Christmas holidays, the city’s 48 two-person crews have filled 22,212 potholes caused by precipitation and overuse, and the stepped-up schedule could continue for weeks, said Cora Jackson-Fossett, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works.

So far, the city has spent about $500,000 fixing rain-related potholes, said Sahar Moridani, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn, and $1.8 million more for other stopgap repairs such as road clearance and mud removal.

City workers try to fill each pothole one business day after it is reported. But the rain has exacerbated an already difficult situation, leaving pockmarks every few feet on some streets, said Kirk Bible, a supervisor in the city Bureau of Street Services. He declined to estimate the size of the pothole backlog but urged people to report new holes by calling the 311 service line.

City residents have plenty of complaints. For example, one resident of a 12th Street block where Caudillo and his partner worked last week said the bone-crunching potholes had been in front of his house for two months.

Even when potholes are repaired promptly, the city just fills them with asphalt, a temporary fix that allows the holes to open again the next rainy season, complained Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

Close said his son recently damaged his car because of a pothole.

“I’ve heard that 24-hour promise for years,” Close said, “but I don’t believe it.”

Potholes are formed when water gets below the road surface through cracks and washes away gravel and dirt that form the layer below the asphalt. Trucks, buses and cars make the holes bigger by compressing strained areas.

The result is plenty of work for Caudillo and his partner, Anthony Ulloa.

They begin their days at 6:30 a.m., picking up a dump truck at the city’s northeast L.A. maintenance yard and driving to another facility to fill up with hot asphalt. By lunchtime on a recent weekday, the team had filled six potholes on Vermont Avenue between Beverly Boulevard and Olympic Avenue, and put down one “skin patch,” a large rectangular asphalt Band-Aid intended to smooth out a surface where several potholes and cracks were close together.

Caudillo and Ulloa cruised down Vermont, stopping their yellow dump truck when they found craters. They set out orange cones to reroute traffic and hoisted a pole with square orange flags for safety.

It was a surprisingly quick operation, each pothole taking about 15 minutes to fill.

Ulloa backed the truck up to a hole while Caudillo painted its perimeter with glue to bind the new asphalt to the street’s old surface.

Then Caudillo pushed levers at the back of the truck, and mounds of black asphalt, which looked like shiny bits of coal, fell into the pothole. Caudillo smoothed out the piles with his rake, and then his partner tamped it down with a heavy, rattling machine that sounded like a jackhammer.

“I find it fun,” Caudillo said.

His job takes him all through downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. In the poorest neighborhoods, he said, he is reminded of how lucky he is to have a good job.

“When I go downtown, I look at all the homeless people down there and I say to myself, ‘Look how blessed we are,’ ” said Caudillo, who dropped out of high school to get married. “We are really blessed to have a job and put food on the table for my kids, send them to school.”

There is a limit to how well the pothole crews can repair a street that has been severely damaged.

When Caudillo and Ulloa finished their work on Vermont, they moved on to a badly rutted block of 12th Street just east of Normandie Avenue.

There were 15 to 20 potholes, one about 6 inches deep, and the street was cracked and rough along both gutters. About halfway down the block was a stretch where the curb was completely worn away.

The pair quickly started filling the worst holes and installed two skin patches over stretches where potholes were clustered.

But they were not authorized to smooth out all the cracks near the street’s edges: Many of these flaws don’t meet the legal definition of a pothole. Similarly, the eroded and broken curbs don’t meet the definition.

Tomas Vides, who lives on the block and owns several properties there, shook his head as he watched Caudillo and Ulloa work.

“Why don’t they just repave the entire block?” he asked.

Vides pointed to adjacent blocks, on 12th Street, Normandie Avenue and Mariposa Avenue, where the asphalt was smooth and black. City crews recently repaired those streets, he said, but left his block untouched. The potholes that Caudillo and Ulloa were filling had been there for two months, complained Vides, who said his daughter had called the city several times to report the condition of the street.

Part of the problem, according to Bible, is that streets as badly damaged as that 12th Street block cannot be repaired using the simple slurry seal process that the city has been using to repave. They need full reconstruction, a much more expensive process that requires further review first.

Caudillo is well aware of the passions that such situations can stir. When he’s working, passersby sometimes beg him to take his truck over to potholes in their neighborhoods. The best way to get them repaired, he tells them, is to report them to 311.

At parties, people complain about potholes in their streets and ask him to fix them.

“Oh,” he says they tell him, “you’re the guy who blew my tire out.”