POTHOLE SEASON IS ALL YEAR ROUND!

(A true story by: Mrs. Natasha Murphy - McLean, VA 10/23/2017)

So I was driving down route 66 toward Fairfax one afternoon heading back to get my daughter from dance class.  After enduring three days of heavy rain,  and at last, a blue sky and dry roads are back- gracing us with a picture-perfect day without any traffic or stress.  But like all good things, an end to a drama-free day was looming just behind the bend.

BANG! Something violently awful and unexpected hit my car from below... it was the road itself!  A pothole... a #*&$% pothole!!! More like a crater engulfed my left side and cut my tire in two parts when my wheel hit the sharp edge of the road.  From the drivers' side, my eye did not catch this until it was almost under me. I tried to stay composed behind the wheel and carefully slow down with the fear of losing control of the wheel and get any additional damage, but it was too late-- a ripped tire, a dented wheel and a screwed up alignment (totaling $1150 in repairs) just placed me into the list of millions of drivers affected by a post-rain pothole.

If this story sounds familiar to you, it's because you are far from alone.  From tire blowouts to bent wheels to major suspensions and axle replacements, over 3.2 Million Americans have reportedly accrued considerable damage to their cars due to potholes each year.  The American Automobile Association (AAA) estimates pothole damage costs US drivers $3 Billion in repairs each year*. The ASCE  (American Society of Civil Engineers) the cost of bad roads to American businesses between now and 2022 is estimated to cost $240 Billion **.

Sitting like a lame duck on the side of the road waiting for AAA to bail me out got me thinking about those FINLEY road construction crews that are usually to blame for my morning drive-to-work  delays.  It didn't dawn on me until now that "they were actually NOT the bad guys after all".  I also realized how vulnerable we as drivers are to these eventualities since our very roadways are that easily affected by nature.  I can only imagine that if a few days of wet weather caused this, we've got a whole country and  millions of miles of streets and roadways exposed to varying climates and megatons of vehicles each day that need constant maintenance.