(ANOKA) – When the snow melted the potholes came out. At first, it was quick fixes and rapid repairs, but now with dryer conditions, and a thawed ground, Anoka County Highway crews are at work providing permanent repairs to the roads that took a beating over the last six months. The winter was perfect for potholes, with extreme cold followed by heavy snow. Then there was heavy rains and snow melt.
“All the snow that’s now melting is creating all that moisture that’s getting into our pavements, but the water can’t go anywhere because the ground is still frozen,” explained Anoka County Engineer Doug Fischer.
So, the water made potholes. Now, crews are working across the county to repair the damage.
“We have five crews out on the roads right now,” he said.
Crews are using the traditional hot and cold mixes to fill-in holes, along with newer spray patch technology.
The county always wants to hear about potholes, so they can figure out the best places to send their crews.
“We get our information all kinds of ways, we have report a pothole on our website, we get lots of phone calls, just our own driving around the county we see things, obviously, we’ll try and aggregate a crew to cover a certain area to be more efficient with the work that they’re doing,” Fischer said. “We do want people to call in, we do want them to send in those emails, everything gets checked daily and we’ll respond very quickly.”
Some of the roads in the worst condition right now are roads that are due for overlays or reconstruction later this summer.
“We’re doing about 8 million dollars worth of just resurfacing projects, let alone all our reconstruction projects,” Fischer said.
Fischer said that it was a very bad year for potholes, but they are catching up and getting the roads back into good condition – just like they’ve been doing for years.
“Over the years, Anoka County and Anoka County board really has made an effort to make our pavements better and smoother, and we do track all of our pavements,” said Fischer. “We have over 400 miles of county roads, yes we’ve had some roads this year that really suffered with the spring that we’ve had all that moisture, all that cold, really when you look at the system as whole we still are in much better shape than we were 20, 15, ten years ago. The system is getting better due to the increased investments that we’re making,” Fischer said.
You can report a pothole on the county’s website here.
Anoka County is only responsible for county road, cities and states generally handle their own repairs. If you don’t know what kind of road it is – that’s okay, Fischer said the county passes on information they receive on city and state roads to the proper department.
