Pothole complaints piling up

LYNN – Winter may be losing its grip on the land but not before dropping a mini-blizzard of complaints and legal claims on local city solicitors and public works directors.Potholes alone have generated 27 complaints from local drivers to city attorneys during the first three months of the winter with potholes the culprit in almost every complaint.”At this point last year, we had two complaints,” said Assistant City Solicitor James Lamanna.Saugus has seen relatively few damage complaints this winter, said town counsel John Vasapolli, but Swampscott Public Works Director Gino Cresta said complaints to the town “are definitely up.”He blames potholes dotting town roads and a winter’s worth of freezing and thawing temperatures that left town crews scrambling to fill, then refill the holes with a steady supply of “hot mix” asphalt provided by the Aggregate Industries plant.”There are significantly more potholes,” Cresta said.Letters sent to the Lynn Public Works Department read like a written transcript of every angry driver’s thoughts this winter after jolting through a pothole: “Damage was sustained to her/his motor vehicle” after striking a pothole.The standard for proving a city or town shoulders blame for pothole damage involves providing proof municipal officials knew about the road defect and did not repair it prior to the reported damage.”The law doesn’t say ?just because you hit a pothole, the town is responsible.’ The town had to have notice of it and failed to repair it in a reasonable period of time,” said Vasapolli.Lynn Acting Interim Public Works Commissioner J.T. Gaucher said complaints are reviewed and the street location where the driver claimed the damage occurred is inspected. He forwarded the complaints sent to his office by frustrated motorists to city attorneys and included the results of DPW inspections to each complaint.In response to an Oakland Avenue damage claim, he stated the area where the damage occurred “…is private and does not fall within a public roadway.”He stated that damage cited by a driver on Chester Place may have been caused by Strawberry Brook “which flows underneath this area.” Following at least five DPW inspections made in response to complaints, he concluded “…there was no road defect found,” but added:”However, there exists some evidence that at one time some asphalt repairs were made to correct a road defect which was most likely done as routine maintenance?”Lamanna said the city also receives damage complaints concerning fences shoved in by snowplows and snow or ice-laden tree limbs falling on vehicles. Again, the burden the driver or homeowner faces in proving these types of claims can be a heavy lift.In cases where limbs fall off a tree located on public property, state law assigns liability if the limb fell onto moving vehicles, Lamanna said, but the same liability does not apply to a vehicle parked beneath a tree.Claim responsibility also varies in property damage cases depending on if a plow struck the fence or shoved a mound of snow into it. Plow damage to vehicles parked on city streets during a snow emergency is, in Lamanna’s words, “a claim denied.”Gaucher hopes to plow through 3,015 DPW work orders – many of them involving winter damage – quicker than the time it takes a mound of snow in a shady corner to melt.”There are a lot of potholes and fences too. We investigate every one of them,” he said.