Potholes

By Walter Schneider

Do not create potholes!

To attract more families — families with children or planning to have children — to come to Bruderheim and settle here, a little extra is required.  As good as Bruderheim looks, it must and can be made to look better. 

Maybe that is what Bruderheim is doing, but one has to wonder.  A few years ago it had been decided to contract the public works department of the County of Strathcona to perform the maintenance work necessary to keep the Town's infrastructure up to par and operational.  The state of repair of all communities in the County of Strathcona is clearly visible to anyone visiting them, and it is impressively good.  It appears that Bruderheim's state and quality of repairs don't measure up to theirs and are substandard. 

The state of our streets makes a big impression on visitors.  Anyone wrecking his car or thinking that he will be better off negotiating our streets with a four-wheel drive (believe it or not, but we do have some places that are like that) is not likely to move here.  Some road repairs are being done, but that is very sporadic.  Other than tar-filling the cracks in the pavement, no regular program for maintaining the roads on a constant basis and to nip developing problems with deteriorating pavement in the bud seems to be in place.  Maybe someone would like to and will set me straight on that, but all I have to go by is the evidence at hand.

Let's take a look at the portion of the Bruderheim road network that requires no paving at all.  How difficult is it to keep our back alleys in good shape?  The example I used here is the back alleys running north in the block bordered by 49th Avenue and 50th Avenue, and by 50th Street and 51st Street.  That example is not the worst I could have picked, and I heard from a number of people that the state of disrepair of their back alley has that in the example I show her beat by a mile.  Certainly, I have no objection to property owners cutting the grass and controlling the weeds in the back alleys adjoining their properties.  Most people do, but it is a bit hard to come by the gravel required to fill in potholes that develop. 
   The longer one waits with doing that, the more serious the pothole problem gets.  Some back alleys are being graded on a regular basis.  Maybe they adjoin properties whose owners pay more in taxes, or it might be a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease, causing the Town Office to do management by crisis.  However, if that is the case, then it must also be that one has to be the right kind of wheel and that some wheels don't get greased no matter how much they squeak.

Just at the beginning of this week I went to the Town Office and asked how I could get a half a pick-up-truck-load of gravel.  I got told, "We don't have gravel."  I said that, surely, the town must have some gravel on hand to keep its back alleys in good repair.  "Oh," was the reply, "do you have a problem in your back alley?  Where is it?" My address was taken down and I drew a little sketch.  I said, "It is not necessary for anyone to come out.  Just tell me where I can get the gravel.  I need only a little of it, and if I need more, I can always get a little more.  I'll fill in the holes.  They are rather deep and keep on getting worse."  Thereupon the reply was, "No, we will have Bob look at what needs to be done, but they probably don't want to do that work in wet weather." 

Ok, I recognize a definite "No" when I hear it.  But that motivated me to take photos of the state of our roads.  The photos you see on this page are the result of that.  I assume that photos are better than sketches.  Bob or anyone else interested will have no problem at all pinpointing where the problems are.
   At any rate, Bob called me after lunch that day.  It is now Saturday, and it was Tuesday when I had the conversation in the Town Office.  That is a fairly long time to wait for a tiny road-repair job that I could have and would have done and finished in no more than a couple of hours.  However, what is a few more days, weeks, months or perhaps years of waiting to get potholes filled in with gravel when the potholes were there for so long.  They were there last spring and looked then like they had been there for years.  Maybe that is all part of making the Town of Bruderheim attractive to prospective families ready and eager to move here.  What do you think?

By the way, when we had that late snowfall in April, our car was parked by the curb.  Someone (was it Bob?) came by with the grader and left a big pile of snow in front of our drive way.  Apparently some people complained about that snow-clearing method, and someone came by with the front-end loader and scraped away the snow in front of many people's drive ways.  In our case there were then two larger piles of snow in front of our drive way, one on each side of it, and our little Cavalier was firmly boxed in.  I moved it without removing those piles by hand.  I should have done that, but I had to go to a meeting and was late for it.   In the process of negotiating the obstacles that the Town had constructed for us I ripped off the plastic spoiler under the front bumper and bent the exhaust system out of shape.  Whenever I drive the car now it rattles as if ready to fall apart.  It would not surprise me at all if I were to get an order telling me that I am violating a noise bylaw.  That is to be expected, given that the Town calls to task people who tip over their rain barrels during winter.

All of the problems described and illustrated on this page were fixed, either on the 27th or 28th of May, 2005.  Things look much better now in that back alley.

Next Page: More potholes

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Posted May 21, 2005
Updates:
2005 05 29 (to show link to page reporting on the repairs done to the back alley)

Back to index page for Impressions and Ideas on how to make Bruderheim even better

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Posted
Updates:
2006 10 29 (reformated)