Anchorage

‘Holes of death’: Anchorage road and parking lot conditions cause mayhem

Lake-like puddles with floating ice chunks fill intersections. Ice ruts are so deep on some residential streets that you might want to turn your Honda Fit around. Snow berms swallow entire lanes.

Then there are the ice potholes — or, as one local Vulcan Towing dispatcher put it: “Oh, you mean the holes of death?”

You’re not imagining it. It is worse than usual. For weeks, Anchorage has been dealing with some seriously bad road conditions.

“I’ve been doing this 25 years and this I would say is probably at one time the worst road conditions that I’ve experienced as a street maintenance manager,” said Paul VanLandingham of Anchorage’s Maintenance and Operations Department.

Some of the city’s road maintenance crews haven’t had a day off in about 30 days, he said, and are working around the clock. VanLandingham said residents should see continued improvements to Anchorage roads in the next week to 10 days.

The Daily News spoke with VanLandingham last month, when a series of back-to-back snowfalls, plus some heavy rain, backed up the city’s plowing efforts.

At the time, VanLandingham said crews could catch up, “if we can catch a break in the next couple of days.”

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They never caught a break.

Crews have continued to contend with “a perfect storm of bad conditions,” he said.

Plowing was slowed by warm weather and rain. Then they were hit with daily freeze-thaw cycles, with temperatures in the 40s some days, dropping to below freezing at night.

“Before you know it, we’re just chasing our tails trying to get everything plowed out,” he said.

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Over the last two weeks, his the Maintenance and Operations dispatchers fielded about 2,500 calls from concerned residents, he said.

The ongoing freeze-thaw cycle at some points blocked drains, leaving nowhere for meltwater to run. That led to flooded roads, and meltwater which re-froze into the thick sheets of ice now blanketing many city streets. Ice sheets are between 4 and 8 inches deep, he said.

That’s caused mayhem for many Anchorage drivers. Jeff Cloud, manager at Big O’s Automotive, said the repair shop gets at least a few calls a day for tire and wheel repairs caused by ice potholes and other icy road hazards.

Robert Shelton, dispatcher at Vulcan Towing said that over the last few weeks, the company has seen about a 25% increase in calls because of “bent rims, busted tires, flat tires” and tire changes.

“There are some places we can’t even get into because it’s so pothole ridden that it’s just unreal with these ice potholes,” Shelton said. “They’re all over Anchorage.”

In nearly any parking lot or side street, you can find “a concave of water and potholes that are built up with ice,” he said.

Anchorage residents have reacted to the situation with concern, frustration and bemusement.

One Twitter user on Thursday reported parking that morning on “a foot or more of ice where a parking spot was supposed to be.”

“Literally, drove up onto it. Parking lots, Mini-malls, side streets are a disaster.”

A Facebook user observed that “you need a Sherman tank to drive down Muldoon.”

Girl Scouts of Alaska CEO Leslie Ridle in a Twitter post dubbed the large, icy pool of water outside the scouts’ office on West International Airport Road “Lake Adventureful.”

A Reddit post doctored a photo of potholes in a parking lot in the Abbott Loop neighborhood with a fake breaking news headline: “Pothole unionization talks stem over tire snacks.”

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Rain is helping make the potholes worse, according to Shannon McCarthy, a spokeswoman with the state transportation department. It, along with where cars drive and park and other factors, “makes the ice melt at different rates at different areas,” she said. “So you’ll end up with these ice potholes.”

Warmer days with rain and melting snow, with below-freezing night temperatures, can also lead to potholes forming in the pavement.

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Meltwater and rain that seeps into cracks in the pavement, freezes and expands “will just blow out that pavement so fast,” McCarthy said.

That explains why potholes large enough to nearly pop a Daily News reporter’s tires appeared seemingly overnight on Beaver Place and Baxter Road in East Anchorage.

The city’s road crews and the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities both are responsible for plowing and grading different roads in Anchorage. The state takes care of the Seward and Glenn highways and several other major roads, such as A and C streets and much of Northern Lights Boulevard. The city plows all others.

Following repeated snowfalls or a big one, both first prioritize main roads and arterials. VanLandingham said that was the initial priority

“Then this rain came and the weather, well, then I have to shut graders down and then we’re chasing flooding and potholes. So that shuts down things that can manage the ice,” he said. “I got my thaw trucks, my boiler trucks, all of that stuff out trying to get drains popped so the water has somewhere to go.”

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These are unusual ice conditions, with thick, especially dense sheets of still covering alleyways, side streets and many residential areas, he said. The department is having to get creative.

“If I go out and just start ripping up this ice, we’re going to start getting big chunks of ice, the size of car hoods and tires and things like that. And then then what do we do with that?” VanLandingham said.

Their solution? The department is getting ready to deploy a “road reclaimer,” normally used in summer for grinding up asphalt, he said. They’re hoping to grind the ice down into “something that is manageable.”

“We’re going to grind down three or four inches, which will then grind up this ice into basically snow and then that way I can plow it, I can haul it off. And that’s that’s what we’re looking at right now,” he said.

Along West 15th Avenue in South Addition, chunks of scraped ice rested along the roadside Thursday afternoon, somewhat resembling sea ice on a shore.

VanLandingham said the city hasn’t cut back on the department’s budget, staff or staffing hours.

“We just got hit with some back-to-back storm events,” he said. “... It doesn’t take 20-inch snowfalls to back you up. These little types of things, these freeze-thaws, this temperature variation from 47 degrees to minus 20 within a three- or four-day period, you know, that type of stuff starts to build up.”

“We are taking this very seriously. We are trying our hardest,” VanLandingham said.

Emily Goodykoontz

Emily Goodykoontz is a reporter covering Anchorage local government and general assignments. She previously covered breaking news at The Oregonian in Portland before joining ADN in 2020. Contact her at egoodykoontz@adn.com.

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