The City wrapped up week 2 of Pothole Palooza – our program with a laser focus to fill potholes all across the City.
Spring is high season for Seattle potholes. Winter rain seeps into the cracks in pavement, where it freezes, expands, and damages our streets. Drive lots of cars, buses and trucks over that compromised pavement, and potholes appear like dandelions in the spring.
After the wettest winter ever recorded in Seattle, we needed to add extra resources to respond to the thousands of potholes on our streets, and that’s exactly what we did.
On a typical day, SDOT has 20 to 35 staff filling potholes, but for Pothole Palooza we redeployed 50 additional staff from various groups in the City to provide an all-out response to those potholes. SDOT’s pothole rangers were joined by our asphalt paving crews, staff from our Street Use Division, personnel from our Safety Group, as well as crews from the Parks Department.
Crews workin’ hard to fill those potholes
This allowed us to double the usual number of teams responding to pothole requests all across the City each day. Plus, we created six teams to proactively fill potholes on arterials in every council district. All of these proactive teams were focused on each council district for at least a full day, so every section of the City received a full-on pothole response.
We thank our Pothole Palooza team for their flexibility, teamwork and ability to reprioritize their traditional workload for this vital effort. Working together, they filled an estimated 8,700 potholes in the last two weeks! We hope you can see the difference on our streets.
No surprise, we had a drastic jump in the number of requests to fill potholes during this event. Thanks to everyone who contacted us with locations of potholes – your “crowdsourcing” helped SDOT plan where to deploy our Palooza teams.
By the way, if you sent in a request, but that pothole isn’t filled just yet, rest assured that our crews are still working hard to fill the thousands of requests we received for Pothole Palooza.