Road crews working around the clock to fill potholes across Fresno
FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- As the storms finally subside, we're getting a clearer look at the cracks and divots left behind by relentless rains.
The city has quadrupled the amount of people on pothole patrol and an app is helping them find problem areas. With the FresGO app, you can drop a pin at the location of any pothole and even take a picture of it, and the city promises a fix within 48 hours.
Dings on the road are harder than ever for Fresno drivers.
"It makes a nice little splash when you go through it," resident Brianna Hanson said.
As stormwater retreats, Fresno crews are scrambling as fast as they can to fill the damage left behind.
"There's one I have to dodge each day I go home," driver Randy Nichols explained. "It's probably three feet by three feet."
The city says the persistent rains bored four times as many potholes into the road than previous years. Instead of the typical one to two person crew, up to eight people are assigned every day to patch the streets.
"I think they are aware of them and doing what they can, but it's such a wide area that I think it takes a lot of work for them," Hanson said.
The city receives a lot of tips through the FresGO app. Just this month, residents filed more than 100 complaints. Crews promise they will try to get to them all but that comes at the cost of a permanent solution.
"Every dollar we spend now on potholes is one dollar less that we spent down the road on repaving a neighborhood," public works director Scott Mozier said.
Fresno is budgeted more than $700,000 to fix potholes, but repaving the roads is much more expensive - so much that the city is currently on a 50 to 60-year paving cycle.
"Potholes are really just the symptom of a deeper problem, of a distressed road, so potholes are just a temporary fix," Mozier said.
Until that repaving occurs, crews are aggressively working to elongate the lives of these temporary band-aids and holding the roads that are cracking at their seams.
