The Iowa DOT is warning drivers the up and down temperature changes are making conditions right for potholes to grow on roadways.

DOT district engineer Bob Ellis says potholes usually appear in spring with the warm days and cool nights. “It’s not spring yet, but when we go from — well what was it last week, 12 below — and now we’re going to be at 40s this week, so it happens and it happens every year,” he says. Moisture that is okay when its warm, freezes when it gets cold and expands to widen out small holes.

Ellis serves District 1 in central Iowa and says it doesn’t matter if a road is asphalt or cement. “No, because it just gets moisture in them. It doesn’t matter either one. The concrete will break a little quicker sometimes. It just depends. But once we get water in them, it freezes and thaws,” he says. Ellis says they can put a temporary patch in the potholes to lessen the impact for cars. “We’ll go out and we’ll put what we call cold mix in them, which is just basically an oil and rock binder, and it’s temporary,” Ellis says. “We’ll put that in there to fill the hole until we can come back when it’s warm to do more permanent repairs. We’ll either have to cut the concrete or asphalt out and go down a little deeper and refill it with either concrete or asphalt.”

He says the fix works until spring. “They hold up, you know, they’re fairly good for the most part, but if it continues to do freeze and thaw or if we have more winter events, we try to leave them low a little bit down so we don’t take them right back out with our plows if we had to plow, which we most likely will again,” he says. We haven’t had a lot of snow so far this winter, which is one positive. “No snow helps, but it’s a lot to do with the temperatures because the moisture is already down in the ground,” he says. Ellis says if you see a pothole forming on a state highway, you can go online and report it to the district office where the highway runs.

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