FIRST OF TWO PARTS
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One of the first things Mayor Kirk Caldwell did after taking office in January 2013 was visit Kalihi where, in front of reporters and cameramen, he helped workers shovel a hot asphalt mix over some of Gulick Avenue’s many potholes.
Gulick, like hundreds of miles of city and state roads across Oahu, had become a virtual pothole obstacle course after years of neglect. During the 2012 mayoral race, Caldwell pledged to get city road maintenance back on track. “I believe more funds need to be devoted to repaving projects and pothole repairs, which needs to be done in a more expedited manner,” he wrote on his campaign website.
Since that day on Gulick Avenue, the city has ramped up repaving — and the Caldwell administration regularly touts the progress. It has resurfaced nearly 1,000 of the city’s 3,500 total lane miles by boosting its annual repaving budget to more than $100 million.
The pothole repairs are a different story.
Despite Caldwell’s early call to boost that operation, the city has not increased the pothole-repair workforce in at least 25 years due to budget constraints, officials say. Instead, they are counting on the road repavings to reduce the number.
QUANTITY OVER QUALITY
With fewer potholes, it wouldn’t make sense to add more crew members, city officials said. They said they don’t have enough data to estimate how far the number of potholes will drop — or how far it needs to drop to make the job more manageable for existing crews. And it will likely take several years before they know if their pothole strategy worked.
In the meantime, the city’s 37-member pothole-repair team is scrambling to complete tens of thousands of annual repairs across Oahu.
To keep up, the team uses the fastest but least-durable methods to patch potholes on aging streets still waiting to be repaved. That often means it has to return to potholes it fixed because the problem has resurfaced.
“We’re not repairing them in a fashion that you would normally repair defects. We don’t want to fall too far behind,” Department of Facility Maintenance Director Ross Sasamura said. Potholes are potential safety hazards so crews have to pick quantity over quality when it comes to repairs, officials say.
Still, potholes on city streets awaiting repavings keep getting worse, causing angst among local residents. Panui Street in Liliha now more resembles a patchwork of asphalt lumps than it does a cohesive road. Allison Lee-Takamine’s grandmother lives there.
“What’s especially concerning is that there are numerous senior citizens who live here, and lots of them walk through the lane out to Liliha Street to catch the bus,” Lee-Takamine wrote in an email to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “Because this road is so full of bumps and potholes, it poses a danger to them and many of us fear that one day someone will fall and be seriously injured.”
For motorists on Panui, “if you don’t have an upset stomach when you first turn into this lane, chances are good that you will by the time you reach the end of it,” she wrote. The city lists the road’s repaving as being in the planning stage.
City crews reported patching nearly 52,000 potholes on crumbling roads across Oahu in 2015 — an average of about 140 a day. In the past decade, the city has patched more than 600,000 potholes. In fiscal year 2008 alone, crews patched nearly 83,000 potholes.
NEGLECTED HIGHWAYS
Shortly after Caldwell took office, the city obtained a dedicated “pothole-patcher” truck, which had been ordered by the previous administration. Since then, the city has ordered a second such truck, at a cost of about $160,000, and expects its arrival within a year. Most city pothole repairs are done using regular dump trucks.
Historically, the state has similarly lagged in properly maintaining some of the island’s busiest roads, including Pali, Likelike, Nimitz, Kamehameha and Farrington highways and the H-1 freeway.
The state Department of Transportation reported patching an average of 40,000 potholes a year in the past decade along the 1,150 lane miles of major roads that it oversees on Oahu.
On average, the state spends $355,000 a year for pothole repairs on Oahu. Its highest number of repairs in the past decade came in 2013 when crews filled nearly 75,500 potholes at a cost of more than $485,000, according to DOT spokesman Tim Sakahara.
A six-member state crew handles that work in cycles around the island. Sakahara said DOT “does its best balancing its limited budget and time to ensure that it can meet its highway-related duties.”
DOT did not respond to repeated Star-Advertiser requests to interview its highways division director, Edwin Sniffen.
City officials did not have specific spending figures for pothole repairs, saying the money comes from the overall Department of Facility Maintenance budget.
REPAVING VS. PATCHING
On city streets, crews repair potholes they had previously fixed as much as 40 percent of the time, said Tyler Sugihara, DFM’s chief of road maintenance. They aim to respond within 48 hours of receiving a complaint, but can only fix a pothole once the road is dry.
Filling thousands of potholes is “not anything to be proud of,” said Larry Galehouse, director of the Michigan State University-based National Center for Pavement Preservation.
The repairs are temporary, stopgap measures to keep failed roads afloat, and in large numbers they indicate that an agency isn’t keeping up with maintenance, Galehouse and other experts say.
An agency with an extensive pothole-repair budget is “preparing for failure,” said Tim Morris, regional sales manager for Crafco, a Chandler, Ariz.-based firm that sells pavement preservation products.
That’s why Honolulu officials aim to reduce the potholes through repaving and why Sasamura said it doesn’t make sense to add pothole crews. Adding staff is expensive and the maintenance department he leads expects to have fewer potholes to fix.
But it remains to be seen whether the strategy will succeed.
The city has about 500 lane miles left in its five-year push to repave the worst roads. It’s about two-thirds of the way through that campaign. Nonetheless, the nearly 52,000 potholes its crews patched last year were about 13,000 more than were repaired in 2014 and about 2,900 more than in 2013.
Officials said heavier-than-normal rains led to the pothole spike in 2015.
A LESSON FOR THE FUTURE
To keep pace with demand, the city workers typically use a minimal repair method called “throw-and-go,” in which a three-man crew shovels a patch of hot asphalt from a dump truck, packs the material into a pothole with the shovel or another instrument, and proceeds to the next job.
Throw-and-go takes about a minute to complete.
Occasionally, crews use a similar method called “throw-and-roll,” in which they roll over the patch with the truck tire to pack it better. This method adds about a minute or two and offers a “superior alternative” to throw-and-go, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
As many as two or three crews a day are out patching potholes, officials say. Each crew works in one of the island’s eight facility districts, DFM’s Sugihara said.
Only one district, Waialua, uses the city’s lone designated pothole-patcher truck. That’s because the vehicle can keep the asphalt mix hot for the long drive from Kalaeloa, where crews pick up the material, to the North Shore, Sasamura said.
The second pothole-patching truck will likely be used in a rural district similar to Waialua that’s far from the asphalt plant, Sasamura said. The trucks typically last 11 years, he added.
He said the city’s efforts will yield results as its crews do better maintenance. Potholes “will go down, just because of the work that’s ongoing,” he said.
For now, residents of Ihe Street, another badly degraded road in Liliha in need of repaving, can only hope that the city does a better job of taking care of its streets after they are resurfaced.
“I dare anyone to drive down either street at 15 mph,” Jean Lee, whose son lives on Ihe Street, said in an email. “You’ll damage your car alignment if you do.”
