By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer

You can blame heavy snows and underground frost for the bumpy rides on area roads, say transportation officials.

“Pretty much, you name the road and it’s a problem,” said Bob Spencer, area superintendent for the Maine Department of Transportation in Franklin and Oxford counties.

This winter’s heavy snows have left behind more potholes than normal, he said. “It has been an unusual year.”

Potholes are as common as mud this time of year, thanks to melting snow along the roadside. That has road maintenance crews scrambling statewide to keep up, with varying degrees of success.

“Some of them, they stay filled as long as you keep them dry,” Spencer said. “If we have another snowstorm, we’re in for a few busy days.”

He pointed to stretches of Route 117 over Streaked Mountain in Buckfield as being especially bad, as well as the stretch of Route 124 between Buckfield and Hebron.

A crew based in Poland is focusing on the stretch of Route 121 between Mechanic Falls and Route 26, as well as the Oxford Plains area, said Phil Dunn, a state DOT highway crew supervisor.

“We’re just filling them as fast as we can, usually on a daily basis,” he said.

Maine road crews expect a lot of pothole work between March and May. The holes begin to appear when frost under the roads starts to melt. The problem doesn’t go away until the nights stay above freezing.

“During the day, the water melts and seeps into the cracks in the road,” said Randy Geaumont, assistant superintendent of DOT’s Region 1, which includes Androscoggin County.

“It freezes up again at night and thaws and freezes,” he said. “It just starts breaking up the road base. Add some traffic and you get a big hole. And with the days as warm as they’ve been lately, you end up filling the same hole two or three times in the same day.”

Most crews use cold patch, a mixture of room-temperature asphalt and sand. It keeps most of the water out, but not as well as the hot asphalt available in summer.

Sid Hazelton, deputy director of the Auburn Public Works department, said the better roads through the Twin Cities likely were worked on recently. Crews replaced the road base and asphalt on top on those roads.

“An uneven road base causes the frost heaves,” Hazelton said. “One part expands and the other doesn’t and that makes the road heave and buckle. And that causes the potholes.”

Lewiston Public Works Director Paul Boudreau said unfinished roadwork downtown is causing most of the problems there.

“It’s especially bad along Cedar Street because there has been so much construction going on down there,” he said. “The road base was already disturbed and then you add the freezing and thawing.”

Conditions are equally bad throughout both cities, he said.

“We get calls regularly through our dispatch center from all over,” Boudreau said. “Our list is constantly growing. Plus, we have crews routinely patrol the major arteries looking for problems.”

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