Rain makes lots of things grow – including potholes.
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Water gets in under the road surface and weakens the soil. That combined with the pressure of cars pushing down on the road tends to make the bitumen give way and you have yourself a pothole.
Both Wollongong and Shellharbour city councils are on pothole patrol to keep the bone-jarring holes to a minimum.
“We anticipate there will be an increased number of potholes across the city as a result of the recent heavy rain,” a Wollongong City Council spokeswoman said.
“Council crews will be carrying out additional road repairs to fill any pothole damage to roads.”
She said council crews were aware of which roads had a tendency to pothole in the rain and they would be regularly checking these streets in the coming days.
The spokeswoman said extra crews were on the job “to ensure we can repair any potholes as they appear”.
“We do encourage people to report any issues with potholes on Council’s roads to our customer service team so that we can repair them as quickly as possible,” the spokeswoman said.
A Shellharbour City Council spokeswoman also reported an increase in potholes.
“We are checking our roads on a priority basis looking at the higher-use roads first,” the spokeswoman said.
“With the large volume or roads that we have getting to all our roads first-hand is not possible immediately so we also rely on information received from the community through our customer service officers to assist us.”
The Shellharbour council spokeswoman said repair work was done on the roads where possible.
“Repair work has started – depending on the weather of the day we are undertaking temporary or permanent repairs,” the spokeswoman said.
“We use cold-mix asphalt to make safe on the wet days when asphalt plants are not open.
“This does mean that there will be some rework but this is standard process in recovery from a storm event such as this.temporary work would be done during the wet weather to make the potholes safe, with a view to returning when the road dries out.”