NORTHWEST WISCONSIN – Besides warmer weather and much of the snow that has been on the ground since December beginning to melt, there is another sure sign of spring being around the corner. We’re talking those pesky springtime potholes. Take a drive on almost any paved road in Polk or Burnett county and, at some point, you’ll be given quite a ride. State Highway 35, just outside of our newspaper offices here in Frederic, is a really good example. Those nasty cracks in the pavement are not so good for your car’s suspension, but may be a good thing for car shops offering front-end realignments, perhaps?
There are all kinds of modes of failure for pavement. One of the more common ones occurs when an older concrete street has been overlaid with two inches of asphalt. What happens is, over time, the concrete and the asphalt shrink and grow at different rates as we experience temperature extremes. Then water will get in those cracks that are formed by that movement and then it freezes and can pop out the top two inches of that asphalt. Despite our road crews hard at work to try and patch up the cracks, it is especially hard for them to keep up this time of the year.
