A pothole is a hole. When you fill it and it fails, it fails outward, bigger and rougher. This one comes back at exactly the same size, with the same edges, and I have the photographs.
I have been on a highways patching gang for sixteen years and I want to start with the paperwork, because the paperwork is why I can prove any of this and because most people have no idea it exists.
A defect gets reported. An inspector goes out and measures it: length, width, depth, in millimetres, and takes a photograph with a measuring staff laid across it. That goes on the system with a number and a category, and the category sets a target time. Category one is twenty-four hours. Category two is five days. And so on.
Then we go and fix it, and we photograph it done, and that closes the defect.
If the same bit of road fails again, it is a new defect with a new number, and there is a field on the form for whether it is a recurrence, and there is a reason for that field, which is that a recurring defect means the fix was wrong or the road underneath is finished, and that is how a road gets on the list for proper resurfacing.
So there is a photograph, with a ruler in it, of every hole I have ever filled. Thousands of them. Held for six years for insurance and longer if there has been a claim.
That is the only reason I am not just a bloke saying something odd about a road.
Defect 1140 was on a lane out past the old airfield, on a bend, on the offside going up.
Four hundred and eighty millimetres long. Three hundred and ten wide. Ninety deep.
We filled it in the April of 2011. I was on the gang. It is a bog-standard job: cut it square if you can, tack coat, hot material in, two passes with the whacker, done in about eleven minutes.
It came back in the October.
That is not unusual. A patch through a winter is a gamble and everybody knows it.
What was unusual, and what I did not notice for another four years, is that it came back as four hundred and eighty by three hundred and ten by ninety.
I need to say why that is impossible and I am going to be as plain as I can.
Potholes do not have a size they want to be. A hole forms because water gets into a crack and freezes and lifts the surface, and traffic knocks the loose bits out. So it starts small and it grows, and it grows outward from where the water got in, and it grows raggedly, because the material fails where it is weakest.
A repair that fails does not fail back to the original hole. It fails at the edges, where the new material meets the old, and you get a ring of failure around a lump of good tarmac in the middle. Every patcher in the country knows that shape. We call it a doughnut.
1140 does not doughnut. The patch comes out whole. It comes out as a piece, and underneath it is the hole, four hundred and eighty by three hundred and ten by ninety, with the same edges the inspector photographed in 2011.
I found this out because of a claim.
In 2015 a motorcyclist came off on that bend and there was a claim against the council, and the legal people asked for the full defect history of that location, and I was asked to help pull it together because I had been on most of the gangs.
Twelve defects at that location between 2011 and 2015. Twelve photographs with a staff in them.
They are the same photograph. Not literally the same file. Different light, different weather, one with a wet road and one with a leaf in it. But the hole is the same hole, to the millimetre, in all twelve.
I sat in an office with a woman from legal and I put them in a row and I said, look at that.
She looked at it for a while and she said, well, that's the nature of a recurring defect, isn't it.
And I said, no.
And she said, I'll be honest with you, I need the dates and the response times, not the shape.
The claim was settled. The shape was never part of it.
I have filled 1140 twenty-nine times.
That number is from the system, not from me, and it is now spread over four defect numbers because they renumber when a location gets resurfaced, which brings me to the next part.
They did resurface it. In 2018 that whole lane got a forty-millimetre inlay, which means they planed the top off and laid new, four hundred metres of it, proper job, three days and a night closure.
It was in the new surface within five weeks.
Four hundred and eighty by three hundred and ten by ninety.
There is a photograph of that one and it is the one I would show you if I were going to show anybody one, because there is a beautiful new black surface in it and one absolutely square-cornered hole sat in the middle of it.
I have done things I should not have.
I put a piece of steel plate in it once, in 2019, on my own, on a Sunday, out of my own pocket, cut to size and pinned at the corners and covered over. It was there four months and then the whole plate was out on the verge, not bent, pins gone, and the hole was open.
I have filled it with concrete rather than tarmac, twice, which is not permitted on a running lane and I did it anyway.
And in 2021 I dug it out properly. Took the gang out on a quiet Tuesday and we excavated a metre square down to the subbase to find whatever was under it. A spring, a void, a bad joint, a culvert. That is what causes a recurring defect and that is what I expected.
There is nothing under it. Compacted stone, dry, sound, the same as forty metres either side. We put a metre of new construction in, properly, all the way down, and it is the best bit of road on that lane.
The hole came back in it in nine weeks.
I have measured it myself with my own tape, not the staff, on the last four occasions, because I wanted to know whether the millimetres were real or whether the inspectors were copying the last entry.
They are real. Four hundred and eighty. Three hundred and ten. Ninety. My tape, my hands, in the rain.
The last time I measured it I sat back on my heels and I looked at the edges properly, which I had somehow never done, and the edges are not broken.
A pothole has broken edges. That is what makes it a pothole, that is the ragged crumbling lip that eats your tyre.
1140 has cut edges. Square. Clean. The way a hole looks when a man with a saw has cut it, which is what I do every working day, and I know that edge the way you know your own handwriting.
Somebody is cutting it.
I asked to have that location taken off my gang's list two years ago and my supervisor did it without asking why, which I have thought about since.
Somebody else fills it now. It goes through the system, the numbers come up, four hundred and eighty by three hundred and ten by ninety, and I see them because I still see the reports.
I do not drive that lane. There is another way round and it adds nine minutes.
The thing I cannot leave is the depth. Ninety millimetres. That is not deep for a pothole; they go to two hundred easily.
Ninety is the depth of the surface course and the binder together on a road built the way that road is built.
It is not a hole in the road. It is the road being taken off, in one piece, four hundred and eighty by three hundred and ten, and put somewhere, and I have never once found the piece.