BUFFALO, N.Y. — We all know it's pothole season, and Tuesday we talked with the City of Buffalo about its strategy to get them fixed.
"When we hear about them, certainly through 311, we get on them right away," said Nathan Marton, City of Buffalo DPW Commissioner.
The City of Buffalo still has its 48-hour guarantee for taking care of potholes. You call 311, or fill out the online form, it gets logged in, and a crew is dispatched.
"At the end of the winter, that freeze-thaw cycle is really where they start popping. We had a pretty mild February in terms of snow levels which we know, and we didn't have a lot of calls, I think less than half the calls that we had last year for potholes, which I hope might be a good sign for the season, but our team is out there all the time, throughout the entire year filling them," said Nathan Matron.
Nolan Skipper is a city engineer. Last week, when 2 On Your Side asked viewers to tell us about problematic potholes, several mentioned the Louisiana Street bridge.
"That's a situation where we would first cold patch it, but we also have federal money lined up for Louisiana specifically to redo the bridge and the streetscape within that job. So our cold patch would be a temporary repair. Once we have that federal funding or, you know, local funding available, then we'll go do the larger repair," said Nolan Skipper, City Engineer with the Buffalo DPW.
Dry weather is ideal for crews to fix the potholes. Each crew can usually hit ten to twenty locations a day.
And, if a pothole damages your car, the city says to take photos of both your car and the pothole.
"What should somebody do if their car is damaged by a pothole?" asked 2 On Your Side's Kelly Dudzik.
"I would also call that into 311. Again, log that incident, and then they have a system where they move the incident around. If it's just filling a pothole, or if it's a car situation, damage, they'll move it around internally through the system," said Nathan Marton.
The city's claims department will investigate and you might be able to get money for damages.
To report potholes on state-owned highways, the NYS DOT says you can call 1-800-POTHOLE. And if your car is damaged by a pothole on a state-owned highway from May 1 to November 15, you can file a claim for up to five thousand dollars.