POTHOLE PATROL: It’s the season that comes after winter — pothole season. We all know what causes them, the old freeze-thaw-freeze cycle that crumbles concrete and tears up tarmac.

Highway and street crews are out patching the winter’s damage now, but it could take them awhile to get around to filling all the craters.

Joe Bowley, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation assistant county manager for Elk and McKean counties, said state crews will likely be working on them a few more weeks.

“Unfortunately, we live in a bad part of the world for potholes,” Joe said.  

While we still run across the occasional frame-rattler, it seems to us the roads aren’t as pothole-pocked as they were 30 or 40 years ago.

Joe agrees.

“When I started with PennDOT 34 years ago, all we did until midsummer sometimes was walking and patching roads,” he said. But the pavement is much better these days.

“The technology in the blacktop has come leaps and bounds,” Joe said.  

The blacktop the state uses now is called “Superpave” and contains additives in a mix that is designed to hold together better, longer.

Another consideration is design, Joe said. Improving drainage to keep water off of roadways has helped many roads hold up longer.

“Mother Nature fights us at every turn,” he said.

It’s much the same story in the City of Bradford, where Chip Comilla, director of public works, said on Tuesday that he’s working on plans for repaving four to five lane miles of roads this year, including parts of School and East Main streets.

Right now, he said, city crews are patching with “cold patch” until a plant that makes “hot patch” opens later this month. 

Bradford streets take a beating because more salt and less sand is used on city streets for fear of clogging catch basins. 

He wouldn’t venture a guess on where the city’s worst pothole problems are.

“The pothole that’s in front of your house is probably the biggest in the city,” he joked.