When it comes to winter storms, the cold weather doesn’t just bring in the snow, but it also causes cracks in our roadways creating potholes throughout the streets.
Maintenance workers will use a cold mix to fill potholes during the winter months, packing the mix down by stepping on the mix and driving over the filled pothole with their truck, but as they fill the potholes throughout the winter, the storms continue to crack the roads.
Travis Truhill, the Director of Maintenance and Operations for the City of Reno explains "Potholes mainly develop in the worst temperatures the worst climate we could have in the winter a lot of wetness and the cold is what creates the potholes." He says they try and stay on top of filing potholes around town as quickly as they are able.
Truhill says typically it will only take them two business days to fill a pothole once it’s reported, but during winter it can take a longer time especially when there are so many throughout the area, "We've gone some years where we've only had to do a couple hundred in the course of a whole year during very dry warm winters. During very wet seasons we even a few years ago I think we ended up doing several thousand."
He also tells us their maintenance workers tend to focus on main roadways with high traffic volumes first, like Virginia Street, Moana, Plumb Lane and areas in the North Valleys.
He says their workers also cover snowplow operations, meaning as soon as they’re finished plowing the roads after a storm, they go straight into filling potholes once again.
