LARRY BRINLEE/WTE A pickup drives by a pothole at the corner of West Pershing Boulevard and Hynds Avenue on Friday. Water has seeped underneath the pavement, where it froze and then expanded, breaking up the concrete and creating the pot hole.

CHEYENNE - Seen any potholes lately?

You might have at least felt one.

As the weather freezes and thaws, it merges with physics to punch Swiss cheese holes into the city's asphalt streets.

That leaves hard, jagged edges in the thoroughfares, right in the path of your tires.

When you thump into a chuckhole, that can damage your tires and rims as well as the vehicle's shocks and springs. A hard knock even can get it out of alignment.

But when you're thumped good, it's hard to keep those bad words from flying out - especially about the government.

But consider this: Potholes are a struggle of nature versus man.

These unwelcome gaps burst onto the scene after a good thaw. The weight of passing cars and trucks works loose the chunks of pavement.

Here are a few things to know about potholes:

Can you avoid potholes?

When driving on a balmy, sunny day when the snow is melting, beware of puddles, said Nick Dodgson, owner of Cheyenne Midas Auto Service.

They could be concealing, hiding, harboring potholes.

And stop tailgating, he said. If there's a pit ahead, you won't have time to avoid it.

Preventive maintenance is also helpful: Keep the correct pressure in your tires. As the temperatures vary, so can your tire pressure. When it gets really cold, you can lose two to three pounds of pressure a day.

Said Dodgson, "Tires are built by combining pressure and heat. If you don't run the correct pressure, tires have a nasty habit of reverse engineering - i.e. they come apart."

What if you hit a pothole?

First, resist the urge to slam on the brakes.

"When you brake, you automatically shift the car's weight to the front of the vehicle," Dodgson said. "If you jump on the brakes, you increase force with which the car is going to hit that pothole."

As soon as possible afterward, said Rich Ratliff, a tire specialist at Fat Boys Tire and Auto, take a good look at your tires and wheels.

He already has had one customer come in with two blown-out tires, thanks to a well-executed strike on a road crater.

If you see a blister - a pocket of air causing the side of the tire to bulge out - take it to a shop. This is a bad thing for the liner, which means you're on borrowed time.

"I've seen some run for weeks; I've seen some that don't make it a day," Ratliff said.

If you're uncertain about whether damage has been done, Dodgson said, Midas - as well as many other auto repair shops - is willing to take a look for free.

How do potholes happen?

When vehicles are moving down the road, the pavement is actually bending slightly, said Rick Harvey, state materials engineer for the Wyoming Department of Transportation

Pavement has that give because the top layer of pavement lies on a gravel base.

He offered an analogy: if you lay a ruler on a desk and push down on it, it doesn't bend. If you lay the ruler on foam rubber, it bends.

Over time, this give under the tires, along with other forces like sun and age, leads to cracks.

When the snow melts, it gets into the cracks and flows down into the base, making it muddy and therefore weak.

"Really, you're creating a softer foam rubber under a ruler," Harvey said. "You're allowing the material to deflect more, and it's going to have a greater possibility of breaking."

When it does, "it's going to break again - traffic pulls the pieces out and creates a pothole," Harvey said.

Another way for potholes to form is this way: The moisture seeps into the group then freezes, pushing the pavement upward. That creates a gap when the ice thaws and a vehicle rolling over that breaks the pavement, creating a pothole.

If the hole is fixed correctly, the problem is stopped, Harvey said. Cities often lay down a layer of slurry seal to keep water out of the small cracks.

But if your street is covered with dark patches, that's a sign that it's time to replace it.

The best way to chase away potholes is to build streets to interstate standards, Harvey said. That is, the street in front of your house would have eight inches of pavement instead of the standard two.

But that would be considered overdoing it, he said, especially when rebuilding a mile of interstate costs about $2 million.

What does the city do?

In some parts, they send loud messages that they are tough on potholes. In New Orleans and New Jersey, for instance, they tout the acquisition of sprayers called the PK2000 Pothole Killer.

But in Cheyenne, the old-fashioned method of a dump truck of cold mix and a crew of three will do, working four 10-hour shifts a week, Monday through Thursday.

While crews do drive around in search of road craters, public works director Jackie Smith said the city also relies on the public.

You can alert the city by filling out an online form or making a phone call to city hall. Usually, Smith said, they can get it fixed within three business days.

But the roads may be getting smoother in the future. Smith says the city has grown to the point where it's time to look at adding a second truck and crew.

Thanks for that could come from all the complaining that people have been doing this winter about another cold-weather problem: plowing.

The city got a grant this summer to help pay for two more plows to its fleet of 11; they should arrive in March.

And the city is looking into adding a couple more on top of that.

"Without a doubt, it's (because of the) calls to the office and the letters to the editor," Mayor Jack Spiker said.

In the Street and Alley Department, these workers pull double duty. When they aren't plowing snow, three of them will be part of the new pothole patching crew.

Smith is putting together a proposal that he says will be ready in a month.