Today a previously bone-dry dirt road near here turned mysteriously into a shallow lake, yet we never saw any runoff in the area. It did warm up a good bit, and there was lots more melting. In this case, however, I think the water didn’t come from melting snow but from thawing moisture in the ground itself. If you try to dig in the soil, you hit what looks like solid ice after just a couple of inches.
For the record, nearly everyone says they’ve never known it to be this bad. The UPS driver said this afternoon, “It’s a disaster.” I’ll second that, and it isn’t over yet, judging from what happened today. Neither of us have ever seen anything like the highway from Moscow to Yakutsk, though.
Photo from EnglishRussia.com
That’s Russia, not northern New Mexico, with many more pictures at the link. In the chaos pictured above, there were over 600 vehicles stranded! It went on for days. People broke into trucks to look for food, and highway workers sent in to help were set upon and beaten up by enraged motorists. Now THAT is a real mud emergency.
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I see the Taos News is going to pay real money for the best pictures of Potholes, but I don’t think you can use ones from Russia circa 2006!