As Bangor cleans up one spring snowstorm and braces for another, the city’s public works department reported spending less on snow removal and pothole repairs this winter.
From Dec. 1 to March 20, Bangor residents reported 85 potholes — 43 urgent and 42 non-urgent — which Bangor Public Works Director Aaron Huotari said is, “our best gauge of the pothole problem.”
This marks a drop from the 107 pothole reports the city received in the same time period last winter, which were nearly equally split between urgent and non-urgent, Huotari said. Residents designate the urgency of potholes when they report them through the city’s website or app.
Huotari said the city almost always fixes potholes within 24 hours of them being reported, regardless of the severity, because crews know they “affect so many people personally every day they travel our roads.”
Hitting a pothole can damage a vehicle’s tires, alignment, suspension and shocks, leading to costly repairs. A recent AAA survey found pothole-related repairs carry an average $406 price tag, and swerving to avoid potholes can lead to crashes.
Potholes form when water from rain or melting snow sits on a road and seeps into cracks, weakening the pavement and the ground below, Huotari said. The repeated force of vehicles, regardless of their size and weight, driving over the pavement breaks up the asphalt more, giving more room for water to gather and sit, leading to a pothole.
“Water is the enemy of every roadway,” Huotari said.
Pothole formation is usually worst in the spring, Huotari said, because rapid temperature fluctuations coupled with water from rain or melting snow are what cause potholes to form and worsen, Huotari said.
“At this point, the only thing we can do is to patch the hole,” Huotari said.
To patch a pothole in the winter, crews use a special blend of asphalt mixed with polymer that stays pliable without needing to be heated, then hardens when packed into a hole. Hot asphalt can’t be used in the winter, Huotari said, because it hardens before it can be applied to the road.
This winter, the city used 112 tons of polymer patch — costing $130 per ton — and 2,408 hours of labor to fill the potholes. The combined cost of pothole filling labor and materials cost the city $63,810.
This city also tested a new, more expensive, type of pothole patching material this winter that can be used at any temperature and uses water to cure. Huotari said the city hopes the product could plug potholes that are particularly hard to patch.
Potholes that appeared this winter and last, however, were far milder than the 470 pothole reports the city received in the winter of 2021-2022, which cost $86,819 to patch. Huotari credited the exceptionally terrible road conditions that winter to the rapid freeze-thaw cycles and abundant precipitation that hit Bangor.
“That was a picture-perfect storm where the roads were being attacked by hydraulic pressure in the day and mechanical pressure of freezing water at night,” Huotari said. “We were also struggling with a great deal of snow, which caused our patching crews to stop patching and start plowing or removing snow.”
Alongside relatively mild potholes, the city has spent less on snow removal this year, Huotari said.
Prior to this week’s storms, Bangor saw just ten snow events, totaling 17 inches of snow, Huotari said. The city used 4,368 tons of salt and 6,216 hours to treat and clear roads.
By comparison, last winter dumped 67 inches of snow on Bangor in 17 storms, which took 7,350 tons of salt and 13,151 hours to treat and clear the roads.
By the end of this winter, Huotari predicted the city will use between 5,000 to 5,500 tons of the 8,000 tons of salt he budgeted for this year, giving the public works department “a nice start on [next winter’s] salt stores.”
