Wagga City Council director of infrastructure services Warren Faulkner explains potholes in recent report on city roads

These are the most common questions heard around Wagga at the best of times, but extreme weather this year has taken our road obsession to new heights.

Another question many of us have is; how do potholes form in the first place?

Council director of infrastructure services Warren Faulkner has the answer in his recent report on the dire state of Wagga's roads.

A pothole starts from a crack in the top asphalt, or bitumen, layer of the road, which allows water to seep into the underlying gravel layer, he wrote.

That layer becomes weakened and soft and the underlying road layer - the pavement - "deflects and rebounds" more under the weight of the traffic.

Fine materials from the softened gravel layer are then pumped up through the cracks and out onto the road surface as vehicles continue to drive over.

And the more cars travel over the crack "the more the pavement unravels".

And so the pothole continues to grow until someone intervenes.

The asphalt or bitumen layer is known as the 'wearing surface' and Mr Faulkner notes that best practice to protect our roads is to seal cracks as soon as possible using "bituminous products".

Not sealing roads as early as possible means that roads suitable for resurfacing will require more preparation work before a new wearing course can be applied.

Therefore, less kilometres of roads can get fixed with the funding available.

In his report Mr Faulkner notes that over the past 3 years of resurfacing program for sealed roads, only 21,276m2 of approximately 345,000m2 of asphalt wearing course has been renewed in the city.

IN OTHER NEWS:

At Monday night's council meeting sought to answer some other nagging roads questions.

On behalf of a community member, Councillor Dan Hayes asked: "why can't we just fix them right in the first place?"

Highways are designed to withstand a "ten-day soak", while local roads are designed to take a four day soaking, he said.

And Wagga's outdated roads just can't withstand the weather.

"We're under extreme conditions at the moment," he said.

"They're outdated, our roads, at the moment, in terms of when they were designed, the number of vehicles they were designed for and what we've got going over them at the moment," he said.

And very simply, it's too wet and there are too many potholes out there, and the council currently doesn't have the resources to be able to fix them all.

"To fill them ... we do that to make the road safer so you're not hitting potholes at speed," he said.

"Recognising their not the correct way of fixing a pothole, there's just that many out there.

"If we take the proper way of doing it with the resources we've got, we'll end up with dirt roads because we'll have to strip the pavement off because we can't keep up."

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