Natchitoches Parish is not the only place with pothole problems. Some people on the other side of the world who have bad roads like we do are finding ways to fix them.
There was a story in a national newspaper last week about two friends who started repairing potholes themselves where they live with no help from the government. They filled 384 holes.
These guys were not elected officials or in the road repair business. One was a used car salesman and the other owned a wholesale fish company. They live in Mumbai, India.
Some government folks found out about the fellows who were plugging the holes with discarded chunks of bricks and other debris and put a stop to it.
The officials were apparently embarrassed that these maverick road workers were getting some favorable publicity for fixing potholes that their government had been ignoring.
When the prime minister of India heard about the guys repairing roads on their own, he promised to pour a lot of money into the pothole problem not just in their town but nationwide.
The newspaper report said he set aside 100 trillion rupees to upgrade roads. For folks like me who have no idea what a rupee is, 100 trillion of them add up to 1.4 trillion dollars.
That will fill a lot of potholes, and there is obviously an even bigger need to fix bad roads in India than in Natchitoches. More than 3,500 people died in accidents involving potholes there in 2017.
Now, the city government in Mumbai has created an app for people to report potholes. In trotting out the app, the city tweeted that it had “found a hole-some solution to pothole woes.”
People with the app can submit a selfie with a pothole to city government. If the hole is not filled within 24 hours, the individual who reported it receives 500 rupees.
Back to Natchitoches Parish, the road problem here is critical but not as drastic as the pothole crisis in India that claims thousands of lives a year because of the huge volume of high speed traffic.
Our potholes tear up vehicles, which creates excessive costs for repairs and maintenance. That often leads to higher insurance rates, more lost time at the workplace and other costly problems. Not to mention just plain old inconvenience, stress and frustration.
It is noteworthy that the news report from India cited a specific pothole there that was considered massive. It was 10 feet wide and 8 inches deep. That would just be considered a little dent in some of the roads here where large objects can disappear into the craters.
Some of us who have lived as long as I have and grew up on shabby roadways in rural North Louisiana became inadvertent experts on bad roads.
Our neighborhood in my childhood days had red dirt and gravel roads. Heavy rains would often wash away the rocks and red dirt and leave us with just mud trails.
Kids didn’t mind rocks washing into shallow drainage ditches on the sides of the road. That made it easy for us to gather them up to bat into the woods with our cracked Louisville Sluggers that the local semi-pro baseball team gave us.
When the roads got muddy, they were usually fixed in a day or so. A big road grading machine would show up and scrape the roadways down to their base. Trucks would dump red dirt that the grader leveled off, and another truck emptied rocks onto the dirt.
The rust-colored soil got dry, and the attic fan sucked the dust into our house through the window screens. My mother sprayed the yard with the water hose to hold down the dust and never understood why we laughed when she said she had to “wet around the house.”
Those archaic roads were better and more functional than some we travel on in parts of this parish.
Whichever candidate is elected parish president this weekend faces the onerous responsibility of trying to fix those rundown roads.
He might want to call the used car salesman and fish merchant who patched up all those potholes on their own and put them to work here.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES