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Reservoir Street was completely repaved as of Friday morning after being heavily damaged during the winter storm last week. Staff photo by Stephanie Page
Maxwell says it may take month to catch up
As a lot of Texans likely saw last week, water line breaks, whether inside a home or on a city line, were common during the bitter cold of Winter Storm Uri, bu the freeze-thaw cycle severely damaged Sulphur Springs street, something that crews may spend a month repairing, city manager Marc Maxwell said.
“During the freezing conditions, we saw greater-than-average water breaks, probably double the average,” Maxwell said. “We typically report a break every other day or so, and we sometimes saw two or three breaks a day.”
By offering a free one million gallons of water reward, the city incentivized residents to report main breaks, and Maxwell said the city is “out of the woods” on that front with water towers remaining full.
The detective’s wing in the Sulphur Springs police department also flooded due to a broken pipe, Maxwell said, and a bar screen, a piece of equipment, at the city’s wastewater treatment plant froze and twisted on itself. However, the bar screen is covered by insurance.
The roads, however, are a different story.
“The streets really took a hit,” Maxwell said. “When you have a freezethaw cycle, water finds every crack in the street and exploits it.”
During a freeze-thaw cycle, temperatures rise above the freezing point during the day, leading to ice and snow melting to water which collects in cracks or holes in the street. At night when temperatures fall below freezing, that water turns into ice and expands, slowly tearing a street apart.
“Water is the enemy of a street,” Maxwell said. “Most people look at a street and think the street is the asphalt or the concrete, but that’s the frosting on the cake. The real street is underneath, the foot to 15 inches of road base that supports the asphalt or concrete.”
Water that slips through the cracks in the asphalt above also softens the road base, Maxwell said, leading to the base rising through the asphalt.
“I expect that future city council meetings I’ll be reporting that we’ve repaired over a 1,000 potholes,” Maxwell said. “There are some sections of street that we have completely lost.”
The streets will be the most in the public eye and “will be frustrating for a while,” Maxwell said. Street damage also may not readily be apparent as potholes form from week to week as traffic drives on streets.
“We’ll pass through and fix a bunch of potholes, and then there will be a whole new crop of them the next week,” Maxwell said.
Maxwell estimated it may take a month to catch up with the winter storm damage before the city “turns to its usual program.”
Reservoir Street from Booker to its concrete portion was one of the streets heavily damaged by the storm, and as of Friday morning, the street was completely repaved. However, there is more work to be done in other parts of the city.
“We take it in stride and do what we can to repair the damage that’s done,” Maxwell said. “It may in fact over the years have accelerated our need to overlay streets.”
An exact dollar amount in damage is not available, according to Maxwell, but he said the cost would be “significant.”
The city is investigating sources of disaster relief to aid in funding street repairs, Maxwell said, and is documenting the uptick in required repairs for possible FEMA assistance.
“Whether or not FEMA comes through on that remains to be seen,” Maxwell said.