Winter brought heavy rain to Long Beach — and 60,000 potholes

After a tropical storm in August and more than 24 inches of rain since last July, city officials are doubling efforts to fix 60,000 potholes that now dot city streets.

The sheer number of potholes — about a third more than a typical year — led the city to increase the number of pothole trucks that will deploy this spring to fix the damage.

“Every time we have a rain storm, we’re going to have a couple thousand potholes,” said Marc Wright, manager of the public service bureau. “Every time it happens, it pushes us back.”

In 2023-24, the city was slammed by Tropical Storm Hilary, which brought an unusual onslaught of almost 3 inches of rain in August — and that was before winter. Since Oct. 1, the city has received close to 21 inches of rain, including 14 inches just in February and March.

The Public Works Department is now trying to fill at least 5,000 potholes every month through the end of 2024, with the hope of reducing the total number to under 10,000 before the heaviest rains begin next season.

The city has four standard-sized “pothole trucks” that can heat a mixture of asphalt and gravel before injecting it into a hole. The city also is deploying three to four smaller pickup trucks to residential streets where the damage can be fixed with a cold mixture that doesn’t use asphalt and concrete.

The city will also again be working this summer to protect streets that are in good condition with a slurry seal that prevents rain from getting into pavement cracks, which undermines and loosens the subgrade of the road.

Wright said workers dispensed 9 million square feet of slurry seal across the city last summer, which likely prevented the damage from being worse.

Slurry seal, however, only works on streets that are in good condition according to the “Pavement Condition Index,” or PCI, a system that scores streets on a scale of one to 100, which is the best.

A third of Long Beach streets — about 347 miles of roadway — are rated in poor or very poor condition. These are the streets where most of the potholes are located, Wright said.

According to the 2023 PCI map, the worst streets are spread throughout the city, including long stretches of Studebaker Road, northern sections of Orange and Cherry avenues, and Sixth and Seventh streets in the Downtown area.

The city’s average score is 56, which is actually lower than six years ago when Long Beach increased the amount it invested into repairing city streets — from $20 million to $30 million — using Measure A sales tax revenue. At the time in 2017, the PCI was 62.

Residents can report potholes by calling a hotline: 562-570-2700.