Pothole patching a perpetual process

Staff Writer

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The Portales street department spent an estimated $12,000 patching potholes caused by summer rains, according to Public Works Director John DeSha, who said crews are working as quickly as they can to keep up with the damage.

“Since the beginning of the year we’ve patched over 10,000 potholes,” said DeSha. “Some of them have been repeats because we’ll patch a pothole, it will rain, we’ll have heavy traffic and they’ll open back up.

“The problem we're having right now is (with) the amount of rain we've had; it's very difficult to catch up,” DeSha said.

Each day a crew is sent to work specifically on patching the city’s streets, DeSha said.

“Some of the roads in town that we're getting complaints on are not ours,” DeSha said. “The state is actually responsible for those.”

DeSha said the New Mexico Department of Transportation is unable keep up with the road work so city crews assist work on state highways as well.

“It's difficult for us to do repairs on the state highway when we're having issues having to do as much repair on our roads as we are,” DeSha said.

DeSha said the street department saves on the cost of materials by using their own mixture of salvage gravel and oil.

“We’re working on them, but it’s going to be a continuous process,” DeSha said.

“Lots of customers have complained about alignment issues after hitting the potholes,” said Brandi Morgan, secretary at C&S tire shop.

Morgan said some customers were concerned with other damage their vehicles might have received.

Morgan said roughly 25 customers have come to the tire shop this month for flat tires, blowouts and misalignments customers said were caused by road conditions.