It’s that time of year again, when you can’t help but notice potholes when driving around the Halifax Regional Municipality.
In fact, the city says they’ve already repaired hundreds of them.
“We’ve fixed about 600 so far this season, for the winter season, and there’s still about 200 on the list,” said Nick Ritcey, a spokesperson for the city.
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Employees at Midas on on Robie Street have been kept busy lately because of potholes, and it’s a little earlier than usual.
“We have in the last couple of weeks started to see vehicles coming in that have had impacts with potholes,” said John Strickey, operations manager at Midas.
Strickey says a couple of different things can happen when a motorist strikes a pothole.
“The immediate impact can damage the rim and damage the tire to the point where the car is not driveable and then there’s secondary issues that the impact can cause with suspension that may not be evident at that point but can show up a couple of weeks down the road,” said Strickey.
“Some of those issues could be a broken spring.”
Strickey says the type of tire that a vehicle has on it can also have an impact.
“More low-profile tires have a tendency to have difficult time absorbing impacts, so a lot of that force gets transferred to the rim, which in turn gets transferred to suspension and it has a tendency to be harder on the vehicle than if it had a set of touring tires on it,” he said.
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City officials are asking anyone who spots a pothole to call it in.
“We definitely need people to report potholes to 311,” said Ritcey.
“We have crews driving around all the time and they will notice them and they will add it to the list but they can’t be everywhere so we rely on residents of Halifax and everywhere across the municipality to let us know where they are and we’ll get out there and fix them as soon as possible.”