Copperas Cove sees $1MIL in street damage as a result of Uri; 195 locations in city limits

By BRITTANY FHOLER

Cove Leader-Press 

City Manager Ryan Haverlah provided the city council with an after-action review on Winter Storm Uri and the city’s responseand touched on the damage the storm had done to city streets. 

During this report, Haverlah mentioned that there had been questions about why the city did not use snowplows. The city’s Streets Department had used a sand/pea-gravel aggregate mix on the city streets in the higher trafficked and potentially hazardous areas. 

Copperas Cove does not have snowplows, Haverlah said. The only organization in the region with snowplows is TxDOT, he added. 

“The other issue we looked at with snowplows is if we did have snowplows, and we were plowing the streets, we would have a street maintenance issue also, because as soon as that snowplow ended up being too low and snagged part of the asphalt on the roadway, we’ve just torn up the road now,” Haverlah said. “By tearing up the road with the snowplow, with the freezing conditions and the precipitation that we were receiving, it would have caused even more damage from the freezing and thawing that occurred because we would have ripped up part of the roadway through the use of the snowplow.”

Haverlah shared that a number of streets have significant damage as a result of Winter Storm Uri. The city is currently looking at around $750,000 in repair costs that the city will need to hire a contractor for. For in-house repairs that can be done by the Street Department, the material cost alone will be $84,000. Haverlah said that the total cost overall will exceed $1 million to repair the streets. There are 195 locations in city limits needing repairs, he added. 

The Street Department spent two days repairing seven locations on Coy Drive alone, Haverlah said. 

“In addition to that, that means the street crews that are going to be doing that are not focused on any of the other preventive maintenance or corrective items that need to be done such as potholes that we already had prior to the storm or crack sealingor herbicide removal and treatment,” Haverlah said. “That’s something that we really need to consider as far as mitigating a number of these things.” 

Public Works Director Scott Osburn shared with the Leader-Press that the city completed a preliminary roadway network damage assessment and has identified in excess of 300 distinct areas of roadway damage caused by the repeated freeze/thaw cycles of the ice storm. These instances of damage range from areas as small as 10-sq. ft. up to areas as large as 3,900 sq. ft. that will require repair to asphalt and, in some instances, base repairs to restore rideability, Osburn said. 

Some of the hardest hit areas include Skyline Drive, Freedom Lane, Big Divide Road, Colorado Drive, Constitution Drive and Coy Drive. 

Although some city streets were already in need of repairs, other streets were not. Osburn referred to several streets in the House Creek North subdivision that had not been on the city’s list of streets in need of maintenance or repairs that were now seeing damage. 

Osburn said that the damage experienced by the roads is a direct result of the freeze and thaw cycles associated with Winter Storm Uri, which saw fluctuating temperatures and repeating periods of precipitation. 

“In essence, when water freezes it expands by approximately 10percent,” Osburn said. “If that liquid water was in a crack or crevasse in pavement, it will push outward when freezing and, often, make the crack bigger. The continuous freeze and thaw cycles experienced during Winter Storm Uri exacerbated this problem exponentially day after day because after the first freeze existing cracks expanded allowing additional water to infiltrate. That additional water, in turn, expanded more upon re-freezing causing bigger cracks. This went on for multiple days and, in some cases, that freeze-thaw effect it thought to ultimately have reached the roadways’ base layers, where gravel and soil support the pavement. Once compromised, this base supporting structure developed frozen-water bubbles that pushed the pavement up from below and once a heavy vehicle passed over these areas the pavement collapsed leaving the damage that the areas have now.” 

Osburn said that the plan to fix the damaged areas is projected to be a mixture of in-house work through the City’s Street Department and contract work with outside contractors, as Haverlah mentioned. He added that it is expected to be a lengthy process to repair all of the damaged areas. 

Regarding any funding assistance for the repairs, Osburn said that city departments are “proactively documenting, categorizing and summarizing the damage through its Emergency Management Coordinator in the event that State or Federal disaster funds become available.”