The intersection of Broad Street and East Bergen Place was racked with potholes Tuesday morning, shortly before a borough crew arrived to do some patching. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
By JOHN T. WARD
One of Red Bank’s nastiest pothole clusters got a temporary fix Tuesday.
A more permanent one is in the works, borough officials said.
The temporary fix, at the intersection of Broad Street and East Bergen Place, involved a pair of orange cones set out to the location of the craters Monday night. A borough crew was sent out late Tuesday morning to hot-patch the potholes, said Department of Public Utilities director Cliff Keen.
But the cones themselves proved an unpleasant surprise for Hudson Avenue resident Nicole Taetsch, who, finding them “directly in the lane of traffic” practically ran them over enroute home, she told redbankgreen. And on Tuesday morning, another motorist swerved to avoid the cones, and nearly struck her vehicle, she said.
Taetch referred to the placement of the cones as a “MacGyver” approach to a safety issue that involved “reckless stupidity.” She said she’d reported the situation to both the police and the DPU.
Keen, though, said the cones, put out Monday night in response to a call from a passerby, were off to the side of the road.
The patch job was a stopgap until work begins on a larger project extending both east and west of the intersection, Keen said.
Last week, the borough council awarded a $1.35 million contract to Lucas Construction, of Morganville, for a makeover of East Bergen Place from Branch Avenue to Maple Avenue.
The project, expected to take several months, involves updating underground sanitary sewer infrastructure as well as a road resurfacing. As of Tuesday, the borough was awaiting the issuance of a New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection permit for wastewater treatment to give the green light for the start of the project, Keen said.
The borough work is being coordinated with Monmouth County, which has jurisdiction over Broad Street between Newman Springs Road and Harding Road, and plans to repave that stretch, Keen said.
There was no immediate word, however, on whether the county plans to install new, more prominent traffic signals at the intersection, as requested by the borough almost four years ago.
In a 2014 letter, Mayor Pasquale Menna wrote that the intersection is plagued by “operational and safety deficiencies that have caused numerous vehicular and pedestrian crashes in recent years.”
A Staten Island woman died two months after she was run over by an SUV in the intersection in 2010.
