Pothole repairs on closed I-75 lanes delayed another week

2/11/2014

A pothole cluster that has closed two of four lanes on northbound I-75 in central Toledo since Friday is unlikely to be repaired before next week, an Ohio Department of Transportation spokesman said on Tuesday.

The closing of the right lane north of Collingwood Boulevard and the right-center lane after the Detroit Avenue exit ramp has caused substantial backups during rush hours.

Theresa Pollick, a spokesman at ODOT’s district office in Bowling Green, said state officials are working to get one of the Toledo area’s hot-mix asphalt plants open next week to supply higher-grade material for repairing the pothole plague that has spread across many streets and freeways.

Some potholes and pavement delamination sites have become so large that the typical cold-patch mix used in winter is no longer effective for temporary repairs. That includes the crater cluster in I-75’s northbound right and right-center lanes near Delaware Avenue, which had been a problem spot for weeks before ODOT closed those lanes late last week.

“The I-75 repair is not going to be made until we have that [hot] asphalt. That looks like next Tuesday,” Ms. Pollick said.

But even that target, she cautioned, is “weather-dependent.”

Any hot asphalt that ODOT can arrange will be available to Toledo and neighboring cities that need it for emergency repair work, the ODOT spokesman said.

State officials also plan to investigate a long, intermittent crack that has appeared in one of the recently rebuilt lanes of eastbound I-475 between Douglas Road and the I-75 junction in Toledo.

That flaw in pavement, which surfaced only last fall, also is likely to be weather-related, Ms. Pollick said. She said she did not know if it would be covered by a warranty with the $64 million I-475 reconstruction that affected that stretch of freeway for more than three years.