You Hit a Pothole in Sandy. Here Is What to Check Before You Keep Driving

Check the tire, the wheel, the stance of the car and the ground underneath it, in that order. All four take under two minutes and none of them need tools.

Get off the road first. On a residential street that means the curb. On Highland Drive or 700 East it means the first parking lot you can reach. On I-15 it means as far onto the right shoulder as the car will go, with the flashers on and everyone staying belted until help arrives.

Then work around the car.

One more signal is worth watching. Every passenger car, light truck and van from model year 2008 onward carries tire pressure monitoring, so if that light comes on within the first mile after the impact, air is leaving the tire as you drive.

A bulging sidewall is a broken tire. A bent rim is usually a leaking one. Telling them apart decides whether the car can be driven to a shop or needs to go on a truck.

NHTSA counted 511 people killed in tire-related crashes in 2024, which is why a damaged sidewall is treated as a replacement rather than a repair. The bulge you can feel with a palm is the casing cords having given way under the impact, leaving air held back by rubber that was never meant to hold it alone. That tire can let go later, at speed, with no second warning.

A bent rim behaves differently. The wheel keeps enough of its shape to hold the tire, but the seal between the two goes soft, so pressure bleeds off over hours instead of seconds and a vibration creeps in that gets worse the faster you go. Plenty of drivers make it home on a bent rim and only find it when the tire is flat in the driveway the next morning.

Either way the spare becomes the next question, and it is the part nobody checks. NHTSA advises checking the pressure of all tires, including the spare, at least once a month when the tires are cold, and replacing any tire worn down to 2/32 of an inch. A spare that has been sitting soft under the trunk floor since the car was bought is not a plan. When it is not usable, a flat tire change in Sandy puts a road-ready wheel under the car where it sits.

Alignment and suspension damage is the part of a pothole hit that does not announce itself. The U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association puts it plainly: striking a pothole or other road hazard could cause alignment issues. Nothing looks wrong at the roadside, the tire holds air, the car drives home fine, and then the steering wheel sits a few degrees off center, or the car drifts toward the shoulder on a flat stretch of Bangerter Highway with your hands loose on the wheel.

Cold weather stacks the odds before any of this happens. USTMA notes that inflation pressure rises or falls one to two pounds for every ten degrees of temperature change, so a tire that was correct in October is measurably softer on a January morning, and a soft tire lets the rim take more of the blow. Checking pressure before the first hard freeze is the cheapest pothole insurance available.

Three things are worth noticing on the drive back. A steering wheel that no longer sits straight while the car is going straight. A new vibration that appears at one particular speed and fades above and below it. A pull to one side that you have to hold against. Any of the three means an alignment check rather than wait and see. Uneven wear across the tread of a single tire, discovered weeks later, is the same message arriving late and costing more.

The claim goes to whoever maintains the road, and around Sandy that is either the city or the state. Streets get handed between the two without any sign telling you where one ends, so the first thing to settle is whose asphalt broke your wheel.

Sandy City takes pothole reports directly. Potholes are one of only five things the city lists on its report page, alongside graffiti, code violations, crime and utility outages. Reporting is worth doing even when your own car came through fine, because the hole is still out there for the next driver.

The freeways and state routes through the valley are UDOT's. UDOT runs an online claim form for damage that happened on a roadway or in a construction zone, and the deadline is not generous by accident: damage claims must be submitted within one year after the injury to a person or damage to property has occurred. The department asks claimants to document the date, time and location and to take photographs, which is exactly why those five minutes at the roadside matter, before the car has moved and before the hole gets patched.

What UDOT does not promise is payment. Its own wording is that it evaluates every claim and does not reimburse for every claim submitted, investigating them case by case. For a pothole, an approved claim generally has to show both that the hole sat on a state-maintained road and that UDOT was negligent in repairing it, which is why photographs of the hole matter as much as photographs of the damage. UDOT lists 801-965-4116 for pothole, debris and construction claims, and asks for up to four business days to confirm receipt and roughly three weeks for a preliminary review.

If the tire is holding air, the rim looks straight, the car sits level and nothing is dripping, yes, drive gently and book an alignment check. Stop and call for flatbed towing in Sandy if you find a sidewall bulge, hear a new scraping sound, feel the steering pulling hard, or watch the pressure warning light come on. A few more miles on a broken tire is how a repair turns into a replacement.

UDOT's stated window is one year from the date the damage occurred, and the claim asks for the date, time, location and photographs. Expect up to four business days for confirmation of receipt and about three weeks for a preliminary response. Approval is not automatic, since UDOT states plainly that it does not reimburse every claim it receives.

Yes, and it takes a minute. Sandy City lists potholes among the handful of things residents can report online, and the report is what puts the hole on a repair list. It also creates a record that the hole existed on a given date, which is useful to anyone who hits it after you.

Only if it has been checked recently. NHTSA advises checking the pressure of every tire including the spare at least once a month while the tires are cold, and replacing any tire worn to 2/32 of an inch. A spare ignored for six years is as likely to be flat as the tire it is meant to replace, which is when roadside assistance in Sandy with a road-ready wheel becomes the faster route home.