CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — "It's inevitable."
That's how Corpus Christi assistant director of Public Works, Rolando Mata, said while describing potholes. Yet, complaints and concerns continue to pour into the city, especially around the area of Tuloso-Midway High School.
It’s streets like Haven Dr. that have people asking 'what is going on with these potholes?'
“It’s really annoying because there’s so many potholes…" Maria Rosas said on her way to school. "Fix it so we don’t have to be avoiding them, swerving around them.”
"With this being a direct route to the high school, they need to get it fixed," Andrea Jones said after taking her child to school. "It shouldn’t have gone—it’s been like this since the beginning of school, right after the torrential rainfalls and it has not even been patched. Usually they do those quick patches and they haven’t even done that.”
Mata said potholes are bound to appear. Crews are working 10 hour days, six days a week.
“It’s anticipated, it’s part of business," he said. "There’s nothing apart from that. The good thing is we are working now with the city council trying to approve basically a third…group for the rehab program. That’s going to help us out.”
Part of the city’s Infrastructure Management Plan, that was approved in October, allows for rehabilitation or reconstruction of streets. Mata said that will slow down the number of potholes.
IMP is a five year project. The first two years of the plan were approved by city council. The other three are to be discussed further. To continue the work, cooperative weather and steady supplies are needed.
"We can do basically a neighborhood approach," said Mata. "Take two or three streets at the same time if we know that we have two or three different work orders coming in. And then we’ll target that whole area."
If you have a pothole fill request, you can call 361-826-CITY(2489) and it will be placed on their list.
A crew was seen filling holes on Mable Dr. on Monday early afternoon. To fill one hole, it took ten minutes. There are thousands of other holes in the city, and the time is takes to fill them is also dependent on the size of the hole.
Their original plan was to fill potholes in Flour Bluff, but the amount of rain prevented them from working.
Their process includes squaring the hole, digging it out and using asphalt.
