Citizens Unite Against Bad Roads
Rise Up and Repair The Potholes in Your Neighborhood
My wife said I was crazy.
An office worker, sitting at a desk all day, suddenly laying tarry asphalt?
"It has to be done," I explained.
Why?
Getting the state or county to patch the roads in our neighborhood was just simply impossible.
So, we citizens united to repair those roads.
On our own time.
Spending our own money.
And doing it clandestidly. It is unlawful to tamper with a public works project like a roadway.
So we had to do it at night.
It started when I had to replace another wheel that bent. Before that were tie rods, splash guards, tailpipes, and front end line ups. If I kept driving these roads I would pretty much have replaced the entire car.
When there was rain, oceans of water splashed across the windshield.
When it was hot the potholes opened up like canyons.
The roads were so rough that if you were wearing dentures at the beginning of the stretch by the end you weren’t.
I printed up some simple flyers and put them in mailboxes throughout the neighborhood.
At first, there was no response. Then, one neighbor, a librarian, said he would be interested in joining in. Then another fellow, a landscaper, agreed to join. Word spread. A couple of weeks into this project I had a group of 11 guys, none of whom had ever done road work.
We met in my basement. After some beer drinking, we hatched a plan.
We would work on Wednesday nights, from 10 o’clock to 3 in the morning. The local sheriff’s deputy had that night off. Couldn’t work too late because we had to go to work..
Then there was equipment, or the lack of it. None of us had trucks, or any type of construction equipment, save a small front end loader the landscaper used in his business.
We started with that. Pitching in, we rented a U-Haul pickup.
The landscaper led us to a business that would sell us asphalt patch.
The first Wednesday we were all tense.
"I feel like we are going out on patrol," said one of the guys.
There was in fact a tingle of excitement and anticipation, that generally one would not expect to get from doing road work.
Shovels, gloves, flashlights, we loaded up and headed out to work on a stretch of road
coming into the subdivision.
Save a few streetlamps, it was dark, and we used the headlights of the pickup to show the craters in the road.
"Gentlemen, start shoveling," I said, which doesn’t quite have the ring to it of Gentlemen Start Your Engines. But it got us going and gradually we filled some
humungous potholes, tamping them down by driving the pickup back and forth, back and forth, or hammering them with the shovel of the front end loader.
After about two hours I noticed a couple of blisters formed on my hands from shoveling the heavy asphalt patch into the front end loader. The last time I did something strenuous enough to generate a blister I was hitting ground balls for my son’s softball team. Pencils at work just don’t do it.
The librarian, after a couple of hours, was sitting on a rock at the entrance to the golf club. A couple of other guys took a break, too.
But the group carried on, some of us shoveling, some of us resting. Though the night air was cool our shirts were wet with sweat.
Nearing 3 o’clock we took a moment to admire our work, illuminated by the truck’s headlights. About a hundred yards of road now patched, kind of uneven, but all the potholes were filled with cold patch and tamped down.
We went home to bed and sleep.
After the following Wednesday there appeared in the local newspaper a story about a mystery group filling potholes, doing the road commission’s work for them.
The road commissioner called us "vigilantes."
Kind of a crazy response to a bunch of volunteers.
Nevertheless, we continued. Sometimes 11 of us, sometimes fewer, once in a while a wife or two, but Wednesday night after Wednesday night we shoveled cold patch and tamped it, filling in every pothole in the neighborhood.
I figured that if the road commission really wanted to catch us they could figure out when we were doing their work and at what time. But we never were busted.
There was another newspaper story, this time saying that other roads were being repaired
mysteriously.
What a fantastic trend! Citizens rising up to fix bad roads.
On the positive side, we brought a lot of business to the asphalt company, the U-Haul place, beer breweries, and the local hardware.
On the negative side, we lost a lot of sleep and if I could swing it I would leave work early the next day.
It’s over now. The roads are patched. Professionally? Not quite. Safely, you bet.
Think about doing it yourself. This is your primer.
Rise up and repair the roads in your neighborhood.
It is the American way!
An office worker, sitting at a desk all day, suddenly laying tarry asphalt?
"It has to be done," I explained.
Why?
Getting the state or county to patch the roads in our neighborhood was just simply impossible.
So, we citizens united to repair those roads.
On our own time.
Spending our own money.
And doing it clandestidly. It is unlawful to tamper with a public works project like a roadway.
So we had to do it at night.
It started when I had to replace another wheel that bent. Before that were tie rods, splash guards, tailpipes, and front end line ups. If I kept driving these roads I would pretty much have replaced the entire car.
When there was rain, oceans of water splashed across the windshield.
When it was hot the potholes opened up like canyons.
The roads were so rough that if you were wearing dentures at the beginning of the stretch by the end you weren’t.
I printed up some simple flyers and put them in mailboxes throughout the neighborhood.
At first, there was no response. Then, one neighbor, a librarian, said he would be interested in joining in. Then another fellow, a landscaper, agreed to join. Word spread. A couple of weeks into this project I had a group of 11 guys, none of whom had ever done road work.
We met in my basement. After some beer drinking, we hatched a plan.
We would work on Wednesday nights, from 10 o’clock to 3 in the morning. The local sheriff’s deputy had that night off. Couldn’t work too late because we had to go to work..
Then there was equipment, or the lack of it. None of us had trucks, or any type of construction equipment, save a small front end loader the landscaper used in his business.
We started with that. Pitching in, we rented a U-Haul pickup.
The landscaper led us to a business that would sell us asphalt patch.
The first Wednesday we were all tense.
"I feel like we are going out on patrol," said one of the guys.
There was in fact a tingle of excitement and anticipation, that generally one would not expect to get from doing road work.
Shovels, gloves, flashlights, we loaded up and headed out to work on a stretch of road
coming into the subdivision.
Save a few streetlamps, it was dark, and we used the headlights of the pickup to show the craters in the road.
"Gentlemen, start shoveling," I said, which doesn’t quite have the ring to it of Gentlemen Start Your Engines. But it got us going and gradually we filled some
humungous potholes, tamping them down by driving the pickup back and forth, back and forth, or hammering them with the shovel of the front end loader.
After about two hours I noticed a couple of blisters formed on my hands from shoveling the heavy asphalt patch into the front end loader. The last time I did something strenuous enough to generate a blister I was hitting ground balls for my son’s softball team. Pencils at work just don’t do it.
The librarian, after a couple of hours, was sitting on a rock at the entrance to the golf club. A couple of other guys took a break, too.
But the group carried on, some of us shoveling, some of us resting. Though the night air was cool our shirts were wet with sweat.
Nearing 3 o’clock we took a moment to admire our work, illuminated by the truck’s headlights. About a hundred yards of road now patched, kind of uneven, but all the potholes were filled with cold patch and tamped down.
We went home to bed and sleep.
After the following Wednesday there appeared in the local newspaper a story about a mystery group filling potholes, doing the road commission’s work for them.
The road commissioner called us "vigilantes."
Kind of a crazy response to a bunch of volunteers.
Nevertheless, we continued. Sometimes 11 of us, sometimes fewer, once in a while a wife or two, but Wednesday night after Wednesday night we shoveled cold patch and tamped it, filling in every pothole in the neighborhood.
I figured that if the road commission really wanted to catch us they could figure out when we were doing their work and at what time. But we never were busted.
There was another newspaper story, this time saying that other roads were being repaired
mysteriously.
What a fantastic trend! Citizens rising up to fix bad roads.
On the positive side, we brought a lot of business to the asphalt company, the U-Haul place, beer breweries, and the local hardware.
On the negative side, we lost a lot of sleep and if I could swing it I would leave work early the next day.
It’s over now. The roads are patched. Professionally? Not quite. Safely, you bet.
Think about doing it yourself. This is your primer.
Rise up and repair the roads in your neighborhood.
It is the American way!
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