Rain puts a rut in valley roadways

Monday, March 1, 2004 | 11:18 a.m.

Recent rains may seem like good news for a place in its fifth year of drought, but talk to those who work or drive on Las Vegas Valley roads and you may get a different point of view.

We're talking potholes opening up, nails and boards swept into the road, concrete washed away, tires skidding into curbs.

Take Jerry Walker, manager of the streets and sanitation division of Las Vegas.

His crews were busy Sunday and last week laying about 15 tons of asphalt on the city's oldest and busiest streets after the rain opened up potholes hither and yon. He expects to lay down 5 tons this week as more rain is expected.

"We've had a little bit more potholes this year than normal," he said. "It's a bit of a headache for us."

Raymond Burke, assistant director of the North Las Vegas Public Works Department, said rain can wreak havoc on roads.

Burke said water gets into cracks in a road, trickles to the base, washes away some of the sand in the base and loosens the gravel holding the base together. The top of the road then collapses into the space left behind, creating a pothole.

Burke said North Las Vegas had a two-man crew out last week fixing potholes.

It's much worse in other parts of the country, where water in the roads freezes and thaws several times over, opening chasms in the pavement, Clark County Public Works spokesman Bobby Shelton said. The county doesn't have what could be called a pothole problem, he said, but crews do have potholes to fill every year.

Walker said many of the valley's streets, though newer than those found in some older cities, are nonetheless aging faster than they might normally because they bear heavy traffic and construction equipment. One result is an increase in potholes.

Additional problems caused by rains included flooding and gravel being washed onto roads from undeveloped lots.

Shelton said those problems are what keep county public works crews busy after a storm.

"When we have nice slow rains like we've had, our biggest problem is debris that washes out of people's yards and constructions sites that plug up storm drains and cause pooling water," he said. "Those back up, and then our guys spend the next day cleaning those up."

Walker said two-man crews in Las Vegas were fixing streets such as Cheyenne Avenue, Decatur Boulevard, Vegas Drive, Eastern Avenue, Washington Avenue and Bonanza Road during the week, and a four-man crew was on the northbound lane of Decatur by Cheyenne on Sunday -- in order to avoid interrupting weekday traffic.

The weekend work would require overtime pay, or $30 an hour instead of the weekday pay of about $20 an hour.

Otherwise, he said, the repairs didn't cost his department an undue amount. Asphalt, he said, costs $25 a ton, and his crews would normally be on the roads doing preventive maintenance. Walker said the city is asking for an increase in its budget to get crews to do more preventive maintenance on the weekends -- though an exact figure for that change was not available.

Shelton said newer standards for construction have made roads withstand the weather better. Now roads are built to draw water away from the roadway, he said.

A bigger problem along county roads is rutting that occurs from the heat and volume of traffic, he said.

The rain was bad news for Rick Ewing, dispatch supervisor for Las Vegas Paving, who took a crew out last Monday to lay 150 feet of concrete on the Duck Creek Channel, by Boulder Highway and Russell Road -- a Clark County contract.

On Tuesday the concrete was gone, and the company was out of about $150,000.

This week he'll have to lay the concrete again.

"Lord knows we don't need the practice," Ewing said.

But it was good business at local tire companies.

Manny Laurian, who deals with customers at Ted Wiens Tire & Auto Center at 2750 N. Decatur Blvd., near Rancho Drive, said his business had gone from fixing 15 to 20 flat tires on a normal day to almost double that number last week.

Most of those flats were because of construction debris washing onto the road, he said.

A manager who said his name was Eric at Scher Superior Goodyear at 6740 W. Cheyenne Ave., said that he had gone from fixing from up to 10 flat tires to as many as 15 a day, mostly due to debris on the road.

Dave Oku, store manager for the Ted Wiens shop at 7770 W. Cheyenne Ave., said he had been seeing up to four people a day who had crashed into curbs due to the wet roads.

"They've been bending the wheels and blowing out tires," he said. "I guess you could say the rain is good news for us."4"We've had a little bit more potholes this year than normal. It's a bit of a headache for us."