It seemed like an impossible task, trying to fix all the city’s potholes.

But by 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, Terry Fursman and Travis Cloud were smiling about making some headway.

The two Lawrence street maintenance workers figured they already had patched some 60 road craters that had been called in on the city’s pothole hot line (832-3456).

“It’s bad. We have lots of them,” Fursman said after loading another 2 tons of cold-mix asphalt onto their truck at the city’s garage, 11th Street and Haskell Avenue.

But their second load still wasn’t enough – about 31 large potholes adjacent to Lawrence High School on Louisiana Street quickly gobbled it up by noon.

As they patched the potholes near LHS, drivers tried to dodge the large holes.

“I hit a lot of them and it messes up my car,” said Anna Witt, a junior at LHS.

Linda McGuire, a facilitator for the school’s adult learning center, said she also had seen cracks and craters develop in parking lots.

“With all the bad weather we’ve had and with all the ice and plowing, it’s really torn up the streets,” McGuire said.

Fursman and Cloud were among 14 city maintenance workers who were out Tuesday patching potholes throughout the city.

By 3:30 p.m., two of the three crews were finished for the day and had filled about 200 potholes, according to Bryce Campbell, a field supervisor for the city’s public works department.

“One crew patched about 115 and another 85 and the other crew is still out,” he said.

The three crews used about 15 tons of Saturock, a brand of cold-mix asphalt the city buys for about $47 a ton, he said.

The cold patch material has a slow-setting asphalt that makes it quicker and easier to work with, he said. However, it doesn’t last as long as the hot-mix asphalt the city uses in the summer.

Campbell said the department normally tried to get potholes patched within 48 hours of when they’re called in, he said.

City street supervisors add to that list by driving in town and reporting what they find.

A crew consisting of two trucks usually goes to a site. One tows an air compressor, which is used to blow debris and water out of the pothole to get it ready for the cold mix.

The second truck carries the cold mix, plus a tamping machine used to flatten and compact the cold mix.

Did they get through Tuesday’s patch list?

Campbell laughed – many more people called the pothole reporting line Tuesday than they could handle.

“The list we have at the end of the day is about twice as big as the list we started with this morning,” he said.

That means when they get started this morning, they’ll have about 50 locations. Some are several blocks long, with dozens of potholes to fill.

For example, at one location Tuesday, on 19th Street from Naismith Drive to Iowa Street, they patched 49 holes.

“It’s real time-consuming when you have this many,” Campbell said. “As far as the worst ones, it probably depends on who hit it and how bad they think it was.”