A season of potholes to mar any ball joint

On a rainy night in Worcester, Mass., Mark Abasciano was driving his Mazda when suddenly, "kaboom."

He hit a crater that blew his tire out. Even worse, he hit a second pothole immediately afterward. "With no air in the tire, it gave a good bend to the rim," he says.

And then, when he pulled over, a total of six other cars were parked on the shoulder with flashing blinkers and burst tires.

It's that time of year for steel-bending potholes, the kind that make motorists wonder if navigating highways has become an off-road experience. Many of the craters dip down to the roadbed - about a seven-inch drop - which makes for an encounter decidedly unlike those ads that show new cars slaloming along a coastal highway.

Highway experts are calling this one of the worst pothole seasons in years because it has been so cold and wet in many parts of the United States. While there is no official national pothole count, there are people who know good years from bad. One of those is Richard Lucas, owner of Vehicle Brake and Alignment on the north side of Chicago.

"I have never seen as many bent rims," he says, recalling a five-foot diameter, one-foot deep pothole on a bridge near his shop that gave him seven desperate customers in a week.

And Dean Pellegrino, owner of California Tire in Thousand Oaks, recalls one recent rainy day when he saw a line of 10 to 12 cars on the 101 freeway waiting for tow trucks. "We've been real busy," he says.

All that bumping and jarring comes at a time when Congress has yet to complete work on a $283.9 billion transportation bill that will help to provide some much-needed money for asphalt. The legislation passed the House in March but still needs to be voted on in the Senate.

"Our roads are in desperate need of repair, expansion, and maintenance," says Mantill Williams, a spokesman for AAA in Washington. "We need something urgent to make an impact."

Laurie Klingensmith of Westlake, Ohio, can relate to the concept of urgent need. Recently, she was driving on I-90 in Cleveland when her Saab's front tire caught in a deep rut that ran along the seam of the elevated highway. It shredded instantly.

She pulled off to the side of the road while 18-wheelers raced by at 70 miles per hour. The repair service was so busy it couldn't come for two hours. Instead, her boyfriend did the heavy lifting.

"A policeman pulled up behind us with his flashers on to give us some protection, and he said he had been doing this all night," recalls Joe Mosbrook, who wielded the tire iron.

Some communities seem more than aware that their roads resemble lunar surfaces. Last week in New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is up for reelection in the fall, braved pouring rain to ceremonially dump asphalt in a Queens pothole. So far, the city has filled 178,000 potholes following what a city official termed "a rough winter."

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