If you’ve driven around on 19th and Main Street in Bozeman lately, you may have had to pump your breaks because potholes are all over the place.
“I’m definitely afraid of the potholes, my car has bad suspension, so I really have to avoid them,” said Pete Wingsted who came into Big O Tires to get the tires rotated on his company vehicle.
On his drive over, he couldn’t help but notice a giant pothole off 19th and Main.
“You have to swing into the other lane to try and avoid the pothole and it’s pretty dangerous,” said Wingsted.
In fact, Archie Hammond, the manager of Big O Tires says on Saturday, February, 25 they had five people come to get their tires fixed after being popped.
Is the pothole to blame?
“It was the pothole off 19th and Main,” said Hammond.
On Monday morning, the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) was hard at work patching up the stubborn pothole that they’ve already had to patch up twice.
“It’s kind of an endless cycle,” said Charles Totten, a crew leader for MDT.
“A lot of what we’re doing right now is slapping a band-aid on the issue until we can get to it later in the year,” said Totten.
He was out with the crew patching up the pothole Monday morning.
“Today we put down about 25 bags of our cold patch,” said Totten.
That’s about $750 in asphalt. Totten and his crew have been going all around Bozeman repairing the roads, and 16 of those bags were used to fill the pothole on 19th and Main.
Totten says this is the most difficult time of year to fill them in.
“High traffic areas, moisture is the biggest problem, and the freeze-thaw we’ve had is what makes these potholes get bigger and bigger,” said Totten.
Despite the tricky conditions making it hard to patch the potholes and keep them that way, Totten says MDT is doing its best to stay on top of it.
In the meantime, if you see a pothole on the horizon—
“I would say safely avoid them if you can and if you can’t, just slow down the best you can,” said Hammond.
