An epidemic of flattened tires and bent wheel rims is growing in Mexico City as potholes proliferate in a city of sinking soil.
BY LISA J. ADAMS
Associated Press
MEXICO CITY - Emma Pérez Fernández didn't see it coming.
Eyes straining in the midnight rain, she was just minutes from home when the front end of her car veered sharply, plunged downward and landed with a disheartening thud in a deep pothole.
''I lost my entire left tire,'' Pérez said after shelling out 920 pesos [$84] for a new wheel. ``I thought it was a puddle. There was no sign, nothing to warn anyone.''
The 45-year-old woman had just become Mexico City's latest victim of potholes -- a scourge that has grown so bad that it is the subject of a newspaper contest, and even a political issue of sorts.
Potholes are the acne on the face of Mexico City's spider web of highways and byways that carry more than 3.4 million cars, trucks, taxis and buses every day.
The predicament of this capital of 8.5 million people is made worse by its location -- on a former lake bed whose weakened soil is constantly sinking, bringing the asphalt down with it. The holes then fill with rainwater, and you can't tell until too late whether you're driving into a harmless puddle or a gaping pothole.
This year, the plague has reached emergency proportions. The holes -- some large enough to swallow half a Volkswagen -- are multiplying under unseasonably heavy rains while the city's repair budget rapidly shrinks. The result: thousands of flattened tires, bent wheel rims, compromised suspensions -- and very testy drivers.
''Because of this pothole, I lost two tires and two rims,'' Iván Barreto wrote beneath a photo of a crater full of muddy water.
Barreto was one of hundreds of frustrated drivers who entered pothole pictures in a contest run by the newspaper Reforma.
The newspaper ran the results over a full page for three consecutive days, attaching ''honorable mention'' tags to the most impressive.
''Here in the capital, we've gone from traffic congestion to shipwrecks, with cars disappearing suddenly into Olympic-size potholes,'' Reforma columnist Germán Dehesa wrote.
Well, not quite Olympic-size, and some drivers did at least see the funny side. One sent in a photo of a paper boat floating on a pothole-turned-pond. Another featured a G.I. Joe doll dangling a rope to another doll clinging to the edge of a hole 20 inches deep.
David Casas offered the mother of all potholes, 11 feet wide and 2 feet deep. ''Even a small bus got stuck in this one,'' he wrote to the newspaper.
Repairman José Hernández welcomes at least 10 to 15 pothole-damaged cars each day into Tamaulipas Tires, one of dozens of workshops that specialize in fixing or replacing damaged wheels.
But he, too, is a victim. He recently drove his car into a deep pothole and ruined his suspension.
''Some call this Pothole City,'' he said. ``Most people have just resigned themselves to it.''
But many are more than resigned; they are angry.
''When there's a hole, they let it sit until it gets bigger and bigger and bigger,'' said Salvador Cerrillos, 56, who has lost more than one tire rim to potholes. ``They wait until 40 or 50 cars have already been damaged.''
Potholes could blight the reputation of Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a populist and, according to opinion polls, the leading contender for president in 2006.
He is accused of diverting money and labor from such mundane tasks as mending potholes and favoring his own pet projects, mainly building upperdeck expressways over existing ones.
Public works officials working for the mayor, however, blame the district legislature, saying it has slashed the budget and left them with only enough money to fix about 5 percent of the potholes they would ordinarily repair.
Faced with a mounting clamor from drivers, city officials have reshuffled resources and launched an emergency program to repair 8,000 potholes on main roads, said Rafael Marin, director of the urban services department.
''We go along filling them,'' he said, ``and they just keep opening
up in other places.''