Cold Patch Crew Fills Orchard Street’s Craters

Shovels in hand, Mike DeCarlo and Dave Lawlor hopped in and out of their public-works truck to patch five potholes along two blocks of Orchard Street. It took them a half hour; they expect to have to return soon.

DeCarlo (at left in photo) and Lawlor (right) patched potholes all over town Monday. They’ve been filling 75 to 100 car-jolting craters a day for the past week and a half.

An especially cold and wet winter has carved up roads all over town with four or six-foot-wide holes as deep as two or more feet. It’s ​“the worst we’ve seen in years,” observed city public-works chief Jeff Pescosolido.

In response, Pescosolido has suspended bulk-trash pick-up in order to free teams like DeCarlo and Lawlor to devote full-time to filling those holes with a mixture of recycled asphalt, oil, and a tar-based bonding agent.

That’s called ​“cold patch.” And it’s only a short-term solution. The city can’t start using more enduring ​“hot patch” until the the ground warms up, probably in mid-April, Pescosolido said. In the meantime, drivers, and their cars, need relief from the punishing pockmarked pavement.

Pescosolio has as many as eight two-person crews out per day, depending on the weather.

“It’s brutal out here,” DeCarlo remarked as he and Lawlor bumped along in their city truck en route to Orchard Street Monday afternoon.

Both five-year veterans of the public works department, DeCarlo, who’s now 45, and Lawlor, 41, grew up blocks from each other in Upper Westville. (DeCarlo was buddies with Lawlor’s older brother, Bobby, who’s now a cop; ​“Dave was our little brother, our little maniac,” DeCarlo quipped.) They work as a team. They have the patch routine down as tight as a pair of acrobats or an improvisational jazz duet, anticipating each other’s moves.

While some people take out frustrations on them, a good ​“75 percent” cheer them on, DeCarlo said. Monday afternoon that figure was 100 percent.

At the Broadway & Tower Parkway stop light, for instance, a Yale recycling worker thanked them from inside the truck in the next lane. ​“Every pothole you guys fix,” he told them, ​“is another pothole that doesn’t fuck up my car!”

The pair turned right onto Orchard from Whalley and sank, then immediately popped out of a crater in the road between Subway and CVS. Public works draws up lists for crews to follow based largely on public complaints that come in through SeeClickFix. (The city urges citizens to post reports of potholes on SeeClickFix or to call complaints in to (203) 946‑7700, said Chief Administrative Officer Mike Carter.) Then, while on the block, the crews discover other holes that need patching along the way, which was the case on Orchard Street Monday.

Once DeCarlo stopped the truck past the pothole, Lawlor hopped out to direct traffic. DeCarlo lifted the dump body, which holds all that cold patch. He and Lawlor were on their second five-ton load of the stuff that day. The pair then shoveled the mix down into the hole while fielding questions from passers-by like school crossing guard Trina Outlaw, who admired their work. She noticed the shimmer emanating from the wet, shiny asphalt: ​“It looks like it’s moving!” (Click on the video to watch DeCarlo and Lawlor do the job.)

Once they had filled the hole, Lawlor returned to the Whalley intersection to keep cars away …

… while DeCarlo drove the truck back and forth over the cold patch to set it.

Before they moved on, Steve Duncan (pictured) walked by and told them about a pothole across the street, halfway down the block. It wasn’t on the list, but the pair inspected the hole, found it crater-worthy, and filled it in (pictured at the top of the story).

Hole number three was directly across the street, near the intersection of Orchard and Dickerman. This pothole was filled with water. DeCarlo swept it partly dry first, so the asphalt could set. (See video.)

When they finished, DeCarlo pointed to nearby cracks in the road. No matter how well they fill the hole, water will seep back into it through those fissures. ​“Eventually we’ll be back to do this again,” he said. ​“It’s a pretty vicious cycle.” Even the hot patches can’t overcome that problem, he noted. The long-term solution lies in milling and repaving entire streets, which the city plans to start doing soon, too. (Pescosolido said a committee is finalizing a list of streets to be repaved this year beginning in May.)

Filling pothole number 3 took under five minutes. DeCarlo and Lawlor were cranking it out. So was the River, 105.9 FM, from the radio in the cab. ​“Wasted away again in Margaritaville,” DeCarlo belted out along with Jimmy Buffett as he drove over the latest patch. ​“Searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt.” DeCarlo’s been singing since grade school, when he performed plays like The King and I with a Neighborhood Music School troupe. (“I was the little boy. I guess I was ​‘I.’”) He still keeps a hand in karaoke, and sings enough on the job that colleagues have nicknamed him Barbra Streisand (as well as The Fonz, presumably for other reasons).

“The worst potholes in the city are on Townsend Street” a few blocks away, postman Paul Comins informed the duo as he passed by on his own route. DeCarlo and Lawlor already knew that: ​“We spent three hours there this morning!”

After one more pothole, the pair had finished their Orchard assignment. But upon pulling out — bump! — they drove over another crater. ​“Damn! Every time you make a turn, you hit a hole!” DeCarlo exclaimed. They hopped out, had it filled in four minutes. Then it was back to headquarters — with many pothole-filling stops expected along the way.