HARTFORD--Everyone is feeling the pain this pothole season after a long winter tore up many roads in the state. The city of Hartford is no exception, and many of its roads were beat up from the brutal winter.
Fox CT followed around road crews in the North Meadows section of Hartford as crews began to plug some potholes in that section of the city.
“This is crunch time. We're doing this every day, five days a week,” said Vernon Matthews, superintendent of safety for the Hartford Public Works Department.
Three- and four-man crews from Public Works have been treating around a dozen potholes in the city each day.“We started to process last week, and we're going from the worst, to the middle to the least,” Matthews said.
Crews spent Thursday repairing Fishfry Street, a popular shortcut between Main Street and West Service Road. High powered brushes get all the water and debris out of the potholes before the work began. “Once the water is out, we come up and put the sealer,” Matthews said.
A sealer is applied around the pot hole, which gets the section ready before the hot patch is delivered. Hot patch is real asphalt, the same material as the road surface, but it's been too cold to make it until now. The material is about 600 degrees Fahrenheit and takes about 20 minutes to settle once it’s applied.
One truckload contains around three tons of the hot patch material. It takes approximately one ton of hot patch to fix a single pot hole.
Hartford’s Department of Public Works Department estimates it will likely repair several hundred potholes this season, and it could take until June or July to finish.
To report potholes in your city, click here.
