Spring has arrived with a jolt this year in California. Hammered for months by rain, snow, sleet and nearly every other conceivable meteorological permutation, the state has emerged from one of the harshest winters on record only to confront a fresh indignity.

“These potholes!” Arnold Schwarzenegger complained last week in an interview from his backyard in the affluent Brentwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Fed up with a stretch of lousy road that for more than a month had been a source of neighbourhood consternation, he had just taken matters into his own hands, marching down to the offending street with a shovel and bucket of asphalt and posting the results on Twitter.

“The traffic is backing up, the trucks are almost getting into accidents, the bicycles are coming down the canyon and almost wiping out,” he said. “These potholes are overwhelming the city.”

Make that the entire state.

From the rural far north of California to the Mexico border, pocked pavement is rivalling the wildflower “super bloom” and the re-emergence of Tulare Lake as this spring’s most talked-about remnant of its winter saturation. Crews at the state transportation department, or Caltrans, performed 85,883 pothole repairs in the first quarter of this year, more than two and a half times the number in the first quarter of 2022, according to Will Arnold, an agency spokesman.

Schwarzenegger said that he took action after weeks of listening to his neighbours complain about weaving into the oncoming lane to avoid road damage. “I didn’t want to make a big deal,” he said, “but I always say to people who complain, ‘What are you going to do about it?’” So he consulted a contractor friend, he explained, “and showed people that you can go out and fix the hole”.

Many of Schwarzenegger’s 5.1 million Twitter followers applauded the move, dubbing him the “Tarminator”, a reference to his best-known movie role, and playing on his most famous cinematic lines. “Come with me if you want to pave,” one respondent quipped.

New York Times News Service