Death, Taxes… and potholes

Benjamin Franklin said that the two certainties in life are death and taxes. On mature reflection, we here in YCBS wish to add a third certainty that we will always have to live with, potholes.

A lot of things have changed over my lifetime, but one thing that has stayed the same since I walked that gravel road to Johnstown School is that I still have to avoid potholes. In fact, go back as far as you want, to the day after the wheel was invented, and you will find potholes being a problem.

I was recently reminded of that fact as I drove up the narrow road to my daughter’s house in the beautiful county of Mayo. This is the time of year for daffodils and potholes – and we shall come back to the seasonal pervasiveness of the potholes in a moment.

As a child, one of the first labour activities I witnessed was the council men filling potholes on the road outside our gate. Piles of gravel would have been deposited at distances along the side of the road. There the council men, with shovel and wheel-barrow, loaded the gravel before proceeding to fill the holes. The project ensured that for a little time, the surface of the road was fairly level and the hazard, for cyclists especially, was eliminated for the time being.

The potholes were a regular topic of conversation in those days; and so nothing has changed. It’s like what Olga’s neighbour said to me last week; ‘it’s not too bad for us – we know where they are’.

Back to my young days, when my neighbour Mick Forde used to dig green, grassy ‘scraws’ and fill the potholes outside his gate in an act he believed might embarrass Westmeath County Council… and in particular, local ganger, Mick Smith.

Our neighbours across the big puddle in the UK appear to be much more imaginative than Mick when it comes to embarrassing their local councils over potholes. I remember reading about a man in England so fed up with a king-sized pothole on the road near his house, that he hit on a plan to draw attention to the problem.

Using a pair of his daughter’s jeans and old shoes, he planted a home-made dummy upside down in the pothole. It worked.

A Manchester man went a step further… in fact, a few steps further. He made a large penis out of wood and had it sticking up from the water-filled pothole. That one worked too, I believe.

But those examples just go to prove that potholes are a universal headache.

In mentioning Mayo, I am not casting any aspirations on my ‘home from home’. Potholes know no county boundary. Cavan used to be known as ‘the pothole capital of Ireland’, but of course it was no worse than anywhere else. I have blown two car tyres in my time by hitting potholes.

In simpler times, local elections were won and lost over who the electorate believed would fill the potholes. Alas, the seats got filled – but the potholes didn’t. When I ran in the local county council elections, I had an answer ready on the doorsteps when I was asked ‘what would you do about the state of that road out there?’.

I said; ‘The greatest cause of surface damage on the road is water lodging. The water-cuts are opened by diggers, and the first truck that pulls in close to the verge closes that water-cut with a tyre mark. I would recommend that landowners be paid a small fee to keep the cuts open… because most of them do that anyway. Then for those farmers who don’t wish to participate, I would pay a man with a little van and a shovel to do the job.’

I knew it was a correct answer for something unfortunately I would have little hope of implementing. The problem with fixing potholes is that they are almost always full of water; the filling therefore won’t set and cars cut it out again in jigtime.

Water seeps into cracks where there is a weakness on the road surface. When the water freezes and thaws, it widens the cracks. Traffic then stresses and breaks up the surface. This obviously is a greater problem where a lot of lorries use the road; and as we wrote in a recent column, there is a trend towards bigger and heavier cars on the roads.

Road surfaces suffer greater stress over the winter and that is why the potholes break out to a greater extent at this time of year. We should mention that potholes are an especially serious danger to cyclists and motorcyclists. Back in the day, I have been thrown from more saddles than all the jockeys attempting to clear Becher's Brook in the Grand National.

Yes, we may have come to terms with the death and taxes thingy… but who has the answer to our pothole predicament?

Don’t Forget

If fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade.