State's purchase of pothole patcher a bust
By Jim Dooley
Advertiser Staff Writer
Nearly two years ago, with great fanfare, the state Department of Transportation rolled out a $156,000 state-of-the-art pothole patching machine that would not only reduce the number of people needed at a work site, but would put down a more resilient layer of asphalt.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
The machine hasn't worked since that day in July 2001.
The Rosco RA-300, a state-of-the-art pothole patching machine, has sat unused in the Department of Transportation highways division Ke'ehi base yard since July 2001.
It has never patched a pothole. It still sits in the highways division base yard near Honolulu International Airport, where the first demonstration for the news media took place.
The machine has sat for so long that it's been vandalized.
The fiasco of the Rosco RA-300 is a troubling story of wasted taxpayer money at a time when the state is facing one of its biggest budget shortfalls ever.
The troubles with the Rosco began shortly after it was delivered. State personnel didn't properly clean the tanks and hoses of the machine.
"My guys didn't know they should have been cleaning it out and some of the material got stuck in the machine," said Martin Okabe, chief engineer for the O'ahu office of the state Highways Division.
Okabe said he doesn't think the cleanup will be difficult, but there are other problems with the Rosco.
The machine uses oil and asphalt stored in separate tanks, which are mixed together, heated and sprayed through a 15-foot-long hose into the pothole. Then a layer of aggregate is sprayed on top of the asphalt to hold it in place.
But the DOT had no way of getting the asphalt and oil into the machine.
"You have to put the materials in from the top, and we have no facility to do that easily," Okabe said.
Then transportation officials realized something even more startling: the machine uses a special kind of asphalt mix that cannot be found on O'ahu.
"It takes a special type of oil that goes with the asphalt that's only available on the Big Island," Okabe said.
The DOT determined it wasn't cost-effective to keep shipping materials to O'ahu from the Big Island, so now the state may ship the patcher over to the Big Island for use on roads there if it's wanted, Okabe said.
To make matters worse, the machine was vandalized as it sat under a freeway viaduct near the junction of Nimitz Highway and Middle Street, Okabe said.
The whole episode has embarrassed transportation officials and the employee responsible for ordering the machine has been placed on administrative leave.
"We didn't do a good job of researching," Okabe said. "I'm not too happy with how things turned out. We screwed up."
In retrospect, Okabe said the purchase of the machine "may have been a little too high-tech for my people."
The company that manufactured the Rosco "did provide some instructions," but when it was delivered, the company "was going through an internal reorganization so no training was available," Okabe said.
The highways division had given away the old machine it used for pothole repairs before the Rosco was purchased, the one that uses a seven-man road crew instead of the single driver and two-man support crew the Rosco would have required, Okabe said.
The old machine was given to the state Department of Accounting and General Services but the highways division got it back.
Reach Jim Dooley at jdooley@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2447.
