 "Photo: Illustration by Isabel Webb")
We see them all the time. They are there in the morning, and they are there in the afternoon and at night as well. Yep, that’s right – potholes, lots and lots of them.
It’s understandable that from time to time that when bad weather comes or when Father Time blesses us with his presence, our roads tend to suffer.
However, after years and years of neglect, our roads are damaged to the point where they resemble something between a crater on the moon and a sarlac pit from Return of the Jedi.
In other words, potholes have become a problem beyond our control and avoiding them while driving down Staples or Everhart should be an Olympic sport.
What the city has done to “solve” these problems is to simply put patches of tar and gravel in the holes. That’s right, patch jobs, kind of like sweeping the dust under the rug.
While it is good that the City of Corpus acknowledges the potholes enough to fill them up with asphalt, this is only a temporary solution. A long-term solution would be to completely rip out the asphalt along the entire street and construct a totally new street.
Why is this difficult to comprehend? It seems that more and more taxpayer money goes into the city but very little goes into the upkeep of the city.
One example of roads that have gone to hell in a hand basket is Laguna Shores, a road that is in such horrible condition that it might as well be a part of the Laguna Madre.
People live on this road and it gets harder and harder to navigate just to get to their houses. For years now, residents of Flour Bluff have tried appealing to the City Council to fix the roads. Not just from the potholes, but to raise the road so that residents can get in and out of their respective neighborhoods.
Just now the city moved to have construction fix the area even though the workers are dragging their feet to get the job done.
While not every road in corpus is threatened by flooding, it is imperative that city do a better job than tossing asphalt into a hole and hoping that no one will drive over it for at least year.
A couple of patch jobs were recently done on Flour Bluff Drive, but it was half-assed to the point where the asphalt was blown away by the wind. In the end, the pothole that was fixed turned into another pothole.
It’s really unclear when the potholes will cease to exist here in Corpus Christi; other cities have potholes, but it seems not as many as here in Corpus. Tokyo has more people and traffic than Corpus, yet the people there manage to keep their roads looking like you could eat off them.
Why does a city like that with more people and worse weather have more upkeep with their roads than a city with less traffic and less severe weather? It is attitude and motivational, that Corpus residents lack in keeping their city looking fresh and new.
As long as the roads themselves do not bother the council, then they do not pose much of a threat.
Editorials are a collective opinion compiled by the editorial staff of the Foghorn. Forward all questions and comments to the Foghorn at
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