'It's pretty rough': Warm weather, bare pavement reveals potholes

While warm weather does not provide a break for city crews, it’s given them a head start on filling in potholes this year.

“It’s pretty rough, there’s a lot of holes,” driver Ralph Baker said.

“They’re a lot deeper than you think they are.”

According to the city, it is able to respond to reports about potholes without taking away resources from the winter weather response.

 “There is actually dedicated pothole crews that work on those potholes year round,” said Andrew Grant, general supervisor of Infrastructure Operations. “There’s always resources allocated to potholes. They are a safety concern if they get too big.”

Grant said that this year’s extreme weather has meant continuous freeze-thaw cycles, which could contribute to more potholes. However, the fact that many areas of the city are down to bare pavement, and even dry, is helpful.

“It does give our teams an opportunity to kind of be proactive … and get a lot of those large potholes filled in to reduce workload in the spring, when the big freeze-thaw cycle comes,” said Grant.

A consistent melt in the springtime could reduce the number of potholes, while more freeze-thaw cycles would be rough on city streets. Grant recommended reporting any severe potholes to 311 as soon as possible.

As far as the city’s winter weather response, Grant said crews remain hard at work clearing catch basins, with many reports of pooling in neighbourhoods around Edmonton. He said they’ve addressed around 57 percent of the complaints received about blocked catch basins.