CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Nobody likes potholes. That is why the city has been working all week to fix the roads after last weekend's heavy rain.
Street crews said they have repaired thousands of potholes in the city since Sunday morning, and will continue working on this cycle of repairs until the end of the day on Friday.
It takes roughly 10 minutes to repair one pothole, and costs the city approximately $10 to fix.
"We don't set up a specific budget for this," said City of Corpus Christi Street Operations Director Albert Quintanilla. "But we have an item for potholes throughout the whole year, which means we are accelerating the costs this time, and we might have to make adjustments later on in the year to our budget to address any overages that we had patching potholes."
Quintanilla said the city is focusing on certain areas it determined need repair, but they are also addressing requests from people reporting potholes.
"On average, we repair approximately 200,000 potholes per year," he said
There are two different types of material they use: normal asphalt hot mix and all-weather patch material.
"But (all-weather patch matierial is) a lot more expensive," Quintanilla said. "It's like, four times the cost of the normal hot mix. So we try to minimize the use of that material as much as possible so we can stretch our dollars."
With constant rain washing the potholes out, Quintanilla said, the better solution to pothole problems is to catch them as early as possible.
"What creates a pothole is the sun drying out the asphalt, and the water getting into the cracks -- start creating the potholes afterwards," he said.
Quintanilla said, in the past, city crews have worked through the holidays.
"It is not unusual because potholes don't take holidays," he said. "Potholes come out any day of the year, anytime of the year, so we just need to address them when they are coming up."
Starting next week, the street operations department will decrease its workforce from 12 crews to its normal four crews.
He said the forecast for rain will determine if they start back up again in these problem areas.
Quintanilla said for every priority pothole they patch, on average, they repair 50 other potholes.
To report a pothole in your neighborhood, call (361) 826-2489 or 826-CITY.