West Virginia Division of Highways crews took advantage of this week’s warmer weather to begin repairing road damage caused by the harsh winter, but officials warn it will be a lengthy job.

“Obviously, potholes are a big issue right now,” said Tom Camden, district manager for the DOH’s District 10, which includes Raleigh, Mercer, Wyoming and McDowell counties.

“We are attempting to repair them,” Camden said Thursday. “However, this was a particularly bad winter and it created a lot of damage for us to repair.

“We have three options for doing that: cold mix, perma patch, and we’re experimenting with a recycling machine. For that, we take old millings and run them through the machine to create asphalt.”

Potholes aren’t the only problem road crews are facing, Camden said.

“Due to the freezing and thawing, we’re experiencing a lot of slides right now, with mud and dirt sliding down into the roadway,” he said. “This can be a serious problem, particularly when they block the road, and we’re working on getting those cleaned up.

“Also, many of our nonsurfaced roads — the dirt roads, the gravel roads — have essentially turned to mud,” Camden said. “We’re having to fill in some of those right now.”

Even the warm weather could turn out to be a hazard. “We’re delighted to see the warming trend, but we’re concerned that with the snow melting and the rain in the forecast that some flooding may be on the way,” Camden said. “We have to be vigilant about that.”

The Department of Transportation Web site currently lists only a handful of work zone projects for District 10, but Camden said that’s incorrect, and that many projects are currently under way.

“We’re in the process of trying to update the Web site,” he said. “We’ve lost our webmaster recently and that’s resulted in the information on the Web site being a bit out of date, but we’re working on getting that fixed.”

Raleigh County DOH supervisor Dale Hughart said this week his crews will be working every day to eventually repair all the county’s roadways.

In Wyoming County, patching potholes may be a slow process, Oliver Stewart, the county’s DOH supervisor, said.  “I know some people are upset about the potholes, but it’s nobody’s fault; it was just a really bad winter,” Stewart said. “We’ve started working on patching them up now that the weather has improved. With all the snow and ice this winter, we used probably 5,000 tons of salt just in Wyoming County, so there’s a lot to work on now.

“District 10 has a pothole patching machine that all the counties are using, and we’re to get it here in Wyoming County on March 22,” he said. “Until then, we’re patching some holes with a bag mix patch.”

This week, two support crews, one from Raleigh County and one from Mercer, are helping clean up tree debris in Wyoming County. “We’ve still got a lot of debris and stumps and so forth to be removed from the big snow storms we’ve had,” Stewart said.

“We’re also working on some of our dirt roads this week, putting some stone on some of the muddy roads,” he said. 

In addition to the road repairs, some of the DOH equipment and vehicles are in need of repair work, Stewart said. “Of course, our equipment has taken a beating this winter. Here in Wyoming, our snow and salt trucks ran 26 days in a row. Now we’re having to do some maintenance and some repairs to them.”