A Tale of Two Potholes

  We live a few miles down a dirt road in California. It is owned and maintained by the county, and we are not supposed to do any work on it. Any work done on the road is supposed to be done under contract using union labor. So any personal attempt to improve or maintain the road is illegal…. and we must accept the condition the county leaves it in.

   Unfortunately, the county probably has hundreds of such roads to maintain, so they only come along to our five-mile road four or five times a year, and we realize (and are told) that we are very lucky they come by that often. At times the road becomes laden with potholes…. so one must often drive at an idle through the worse areas, to go faster is to invite severe damage to your vehicle because the holes cannot be avoided.

   A primary reason for the holes is the people who insist on travelling at high speeds along the road…. each time a tire hits  a wet pothole at speed, it will sink into the hole and splash a bit of mud out, deepening and widening the hole. In time, many of them become several inches deep, and may become a few feet wide.

   Often people will swerve all across the road in their attempts to avoid the potholes… this makes for distracted drivers who are aware of the holes, but not used to seeing another vehicle on the road… they may concentrate more on avoiding holes than other drivers. Also the potholes have disabled vehicles causing them to veer off the roadway or to become stranded immobile in the roadway imperiling the occupants and other vehicles.

   This winter has been one of the wettest we’ve had…. and the road now has more traffic than ever before… so it is seriously the worse I ever recall seeing it. Here’s a few photos of two vehicles that experienced sad consequences for the pocketbooks of the owners…. but luckily no one was injured in either.

   The top three photos are a neighbor who was travelling down the road and encountered a vehicle going the other direction travelling on his side of the road to avoid the large pothole in the road…. he ran off the road to avoid a head-on collision… his vehicle rolled while running down the bank, but luckily he was properly belted-in and had no loose items in the cab to strike him… so no one was physically injured.

 

  The lower three photos is one of our neighbors who tried to drive around the pothole in the photo. My little truck can slip between the pothole and the edge of the roadway… but this large truck could not fit… as he tried to avoid the pothole the soft moist soil on the bank started to slip downhill…. and the entire truck started slipping sideways…. he tried to climb back up… but each attempt brought the truck closer to a tragic slide downhill… he stopped before things got worse,,, and with two tow trucks it was possible to slide it back onto the roadway where he drove off with the vehicle undamaged… and he didn’t get hurt… but his pocketbook is a bit lighter after he paid the two tow trucks.

  I’ve also seen a couple of vehicles with tires that blew out after hitting a hole at speed, and two that had the shock mounts break in just the last month…. and I only see the tip of the iceberg in vehicular damage as I usually only drive out once a week this time of year. There are likely many incidents I don’t know of.