COOS COUNTY — If someone made a Hollywood movie about roads in Coos County, the tagline could be: “More bump and grind than a hip-hop video!” Or, perhaps: “It’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

Either way, streets in the county’s cities and outlying areas are in disrepair, and no one knows that more than people who make a living on the road.

Take Becky Esch, for example.

The part-time taxi driver and manager of Full Moon Taxi in Coos Bay often feels a surge of embarrassment and exasperation when driving an out-of-town customer through a patch of jarring, teeth-shattering potholes.

“My reaction is, ‘Good lord! Can’t we do something about this?’” Esch said. “Our streets are in horrible condition, and I’m bouncing them all over the place.

“It just doesn’t say much for our town if the streets that we run these people on are in horrible repair.”

From the beginning of November to April 1, Esch said Full Moon spent between $5,000 and $7,000 to repair struts, ripped tires, oil pans, shocks and other auto parts among its fleet of five cars, after run-ins with chuckholes.

“It’s terrible,” she said, adding many street repairs don’t make for smooth driving either.

Jim Davidson, a 21-year alignment tech veteran at the Coos Bay Les Schwab Tire Center, said cars driving on cracked and crumbling asphalt have a much shorter life expectancy than those on smooth roads. He added that lighter cars, and those of a lower quality, are more susceptible to damage.

“The people who live on them, they all know too well what the roads do to their vehicles,” Davidson said. “The wear and tear we see — worn tie rods, ball joints, rubber components, the shocks and struts — those are the main things we will see on a car that lives on a bad road.”  

Tires, too, are at risk of a blowout or tear, if they come in contact with a particularly deep pothole with sharp sides.

Although he does deal with these repairs regularly, Davidson said major damage doesn’t occur that often.

“It takes a pretty big hole,” he said.

Street maintenance

North Bend City Engineer Matt Whitty said the street department is diligent about repairing potholes, but until summer, most repairs are more Band-Aid than remedy.

The city of North Bend maintains 57 miles of road, including gravel streets, and uses about eight truckloads — 11 tons per truck — of cold asphalt aggregate mix. Used for small repairs, the cold mix is pliable when cool and can be stored for about three months for quick fixes. Hot asphalt, Whitty explained, must be used right away and has to be picked up directly from a hot-mix plant. Coos Bay maintains 129.52 lane miles of asphalt road and 17.5 miles of graded gravel roads.

When a hole is reported, it is put on a list, and when there are enough, a member of the street crew will hit the streets and patch several holes in one go. This scenario occurs about once a month. However, if a hole is on a main street, “we go out right away and repair it,” Whitty said.

“If we have a pothole on a residential street, we will repair that with cold mix. It might stay there for 10 years and be just fine. But on a collector street or a higher traffic street ... the cold mix is used as a temporary repair until we can go back and make a more permanent fix with hot-mix asphalt,” Whitty said.

The city engineer said he doesn’t know how North Bend compares to other Coos County cities in terms of repairing the asphalt land mines, but he said North Bend works hard to fill them in.

“They are a road hazard,” Whitty said. “I think you’ll have a hard time finding a pothole in North Bend that hasn’t been repaired.”

Filling holes

Albert Gouley, the senior maintenance equipment operator for the city of the North Bend’s Street Division, is one of four people working to keep the roads in shape.

On dry days, Gouley, 43, will start up a large, yellow backhoe at the city shops on California Avenue and scoop up cold mix and drive over to the nearest pothole. On Thursday, he headed to Coos Head Builders Supply, near the intersection of Montana and Union avenues, to fill in a worn patch of road in front of a lot the business uses for storage. There, he piled and then spread shovel load, after 15-pound shovel load of the grainy, black concoction.  

“It’s like a disease. If you don’t get it capped off, the water spreads underneath your good asphalt and it starts deteriorating,” Gouley said.

Filling potholes is important, he explained, because it prevents people from tripping while on foot and cars from needing new shocks.

“Safety for the public is priority number one,” Gouley said as he worked. “You hit those and you can do your vehicle some damage.

“I really like filling potholes (because) you can see your accomplishment. I know I don’t want to hit a pothole at night.”

After he finished, Gouley jumped back into the driver’s seat of the backhoe and drove the contraption over the cold mix, which squished like Play-Doh as it compacted.

Creation of a pothole

Steve Doty, Coos Bay’s operations administrator, said potholes are especially common during wet weather.

Most potholes are created when cracks appear in a street’s pavement, Doty said. Water seeps through these fissures and collects in the sub-basin, mixing with dirt to form a mushy blend. When a vehicle drives over this cracked section of road, the asphalt lacks support, so it sinks, then springs back up once the weight has been lifted.

A similar problem occurs if a spring develops underneath a road, only then the water causes the asphalt to push upward until a vehicle forces it level again.

Heavily used roads are particularly susceptible to potholes because of the nearly constant flexing when cracks appear in asphalt, Doty said.

It is for this reason Coos Bay will focus its road-repair funds this summer to overlay two main roads: North 10th Street and Newmark Avenue.

This winter has been especially rough on North 10th Street at the intersection with Hemlock Avenue.

“You have so much moisture there,” Doty said. “It just gets beat up with all the traffic.”

Crews have repeatedly laid down a cold mixture of asphalt, but Doty acknowledges it’s only a stopgap measure.

Repairing roadways without asphalt is not an option, but Tony Martinez, Oregon Department of Transportation’s maintenance manager in Coos County, has gotten creative addressing the pothole problem.

For years, ODOT has used thermal plastics in stop bars and crosswalks. The material is melted into the pavement to serve as a reflector.

Martinez asked if the company produced black plastic, and when he learned it did, he ordered some. Unlike the reflector model, this black version does not contain glass beads. Instead, it has sand grit to prevent skidding.

ODOT installed some of the square pieces on potholes located on U.S. Highway 101 near Lumbermen’s.

“We got two weeks of heavy rain and it stayed there,” he said.

For bigger potholes, ODOT has a grinder that is shared by a number of crews in the southwestern part of the state, so Martinez and his men have it for about three to four weeks a year. The rest of the time, they take a grader, dump asphalt over the bad area of road and roll over it.

North Bend also is doing two major street overlay projects on Broadway Avenue, as well as on Sherman and part of Newmark avenues. The main collector and arterial streets are in disrepair, Whitty said, and the city has finally saved enough money from its share of federal gas tax dollars, which are administered by the Oregon Department of Transportation. Each year, North Bend receives between $80,000 and 110,000, and to date has put away about $480,000 for the street projects.

For minor, daily repairs, the city uses its allotment from the state gas tax. Whitty said North Bend receives about $43.50 per person, per year. But the amount of money does depend on how much gas is purchased in the state, he said.

In Coquille, the city uses a priority approach. For potholes, those deemed unsafe are patched sooner, City Manager Terence O’Connor said.

“Places where it is dangerous, on a major collector ... or if it is a real tire buster, we try to get to it sooner,” he said.

In the wintertime, the city uses cold mix filler as a quick-fix to patch potholes. When the weather improves, crews use hot mix for a more permanent repair.

Coquille’s state Highway 42 neighbor, the city of Myrtle Point gives potholes, at least big or dangerous ones, quick attention.

“We are so small that we can drive every street in the city in half a day,” Myrtle Point Interim City Manager Randy Whobrey said. “We can usually get to them the same day or the next day.”

Whobrey said crews are out every few weeks looking for and patching potholes. The biggest challenge for the city is the rising cost of asphalt.

People can report potholes on county roads. The repairs are put on work order for Road Department crews. Sometimes patches or fill on the county’s gravel roads can break down or be washed away within a matter of days if not done in at the right time or in suitable weather, Coos County Commissioner and Road Department Liaison  Kevin Stufflebean said.

“We tend to get to them, but they come back miraculously if they are not done correctly,” Stufflebean said.

Increasing costs

The cost of overlaying roads is becoming more expensive every year.

Doty noted the city used to rely on annual road levies that brought in as much as $150,000. Those additional sources of revenue are gone, replaced by growing numbers on the other side of the ledger.

After paving Newmark from Ocean Boulevard to Schoneman Street, the city will pave from Schoneman to Cammann Street. Paving those three blocks will cost $380,000, which is paid by interest from a fund set up by the city after it took over maintenance for parts of Newmark, Ocean, Central, Anderson and Coos River Highway.

The city also receives funding from the state gas tax, about $132,000, which will be used on North 10th Street, though with the cost of materials continually rising, the city may be limited as to how much paving it can complete.

“It’s the cost of oil. It just keeps going up,” Doty said.