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LEWIS COUNTY, MO. -- If you think the winter weather was hard on you, it was even worse on area roads.

Pot holes have popped up everywhere.

Crews have been out fixing them just about as fast as they pop up.

Jennifer Hinson is an Area Engineer with MODOT and she tells KHQA that pot holes are worse this year because we've had more ice and snow.

When moisture gets into a crack and freezes and thaw many times, it creates pot holes.

"What we've done is try to pothole patch every day that we can. Unfortunately, in February, it snowed a couple days. We'd pothole patch a couple days, it'd snow again. The potholes we fixed before came back out," says Hinson.

Hinson says older asphalt roads are having even bigger problems - particularly the lettered roads.

Crews will continue to patch the holes as they pop up, but come summer, MODOT can get out and fix the problems better so the roads will be in good shape for next winter.

Buses with the Lewis County C-1 School district cover the most amount of miles in our area.

Many of those routes are along lettered roads.

We checked in with that school district to find out how potholes pose a problem.

The Lewis County C-1 School district is one of several districts in Northeast Missouri whose buses are running on hard surfaces only.

As crews continue fixing the potholes across the area school districts like Lewis County are going full throttle.

"If a bus hits a pothole, it can knock the front end out of alignment. If you swerve to miss a pothole, that's not safe either because you take a chance of losing control," says E.H. Smith.

The problem for Lewis County goes beyond potholes. The buses travel a lot of gravel roads, and with the melt we've been having, a lot of that gravel has turned to mud. E.H. Smith is the Transportation Director for Lewis County C-1 School District. He says soft gravel roads simply slow the district down.

"We have 19 buses and all but one bus travels on gravel roads. When we pull buses off gravel roads, then we have to make sure the parents know where to meet the bus and when to meet the bus," says Smith.

Smith spends part of his time driving around on both asphalt and gravel roads this time of year to assess the conditions of the roads. He says one big problem with the gravel roads is the heavy buses can leave ruts behind.

"That's one of the reasons we try not to travel roads when they are like that. It's just tearing roads up. It's going to make it harder for the county to get back in shape," says Smith.

Smith does say the county and state do a great job of clearing the roads after a snow storm. They also make extra places for the buses to turn around when they know buses won't be able to get down the gravel roads.

Smith tells KHQA this past winter, two school buses got stuck.

One couldn't get out of a parking lot, the other got stuck on a gravel road.

But he says parents have been very supportive and understanding about the decision to run buses on hard surfaces only.