Bethel highway repair underway as warm winter destroys state roads across Alaska

The state has gone to work responding to Bethel's pothole predicament: On Thursday, the Department of Transportation began repairing Chief Eddie Hoffman Highway.

The warm winter has wreaked similar havoc on highways across Alaska.

Transportation officials will start by ripping down into the Bethel highway's most heavily damaged areas between City Hall and Brown's Slough.

"What we're going to do is mill it up; we're gonna shape it and get it in good shape. It'll be more of a gravel/recycled asphalt product," said Shannon McCarthy, Department of Transportation spokesperson.

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The road will stay in that condition with the city grading the product until the entire highway is repaved in summer 2019. DOT will fill the rest of the highway potholes with recycled asphalt, which the agency has a small stockpile of in Bethel and has brought indoors to thaw.

The road's destruction happened quickly.

"We've been trying to keep up with the potholes, and obviously they're forming faster than we can keep up," McCarthy said.

Over the past month, Chief Eddie Hoffman Highway has crumbled into a cratered moonscape.

It's the same story all over the state, and the problem is how warm this winter has been. Instead of temperatures dropping below freezing and staying there, they've been fluctuating above and below that point for months.

"We didn't used to get that freeze/thaw (in) November, December, January, February. And we're getting more of that," McCarthy said. "And unfortunately, that contributes to that potholing that we get in the spring."

This issue has been escalating for years as winters have grown warmer, forcing the state to spend more money on road maintenance. The DOT is paying for the Bethel repairs with a $70,000 emergency procurement. Even so, the DOT expects more potholes to form once they're done. The roads are still wet; there's plenty more snow to melt; and the freeze/thaw cycle is continuing.

Last week, KYUK reported that DOT's webpage for reporting potholes did not list contacts for any Western Alaska communities. This week, the DOT is adding an email address for anyone in the state to use to report a pothole: dot.potholes@alaska.gov.

This story is republished with permission from KYUK.