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During a typical summer of road work, crews stay busy painting new stripes on some roads and repainting faded stripes on others. But this isn’t a typical summer.

Significantly increased prices for several chemicals and raw materials used to make water-based reflective paint have created a global paint shortage, leaving counties and cities across Oregon unable to perform necessary maintenance on roads.

“Usually by now we’ve gone through 70 totes of paint, which are 250 gallons each,” said Larry Kanub, who is in charge of ordering paint for Washington County. “This summer we’ve gone through 10.”

“I just talked to the paint company, and they said they are making paint and I’ll have the paint this week,” he said. “But they’ve been telling me that for weeks.”

Other Oregon counties are encountering similar problems.

Mike Chasteen, traffic safety supervisor for Douglas County, said he has received only 7,000 of the 37,000 gallons of paint he has ordered this year. He estimated that the county will be out of paint in less than two weeks.

“We found out in April that there was going to be a shortage, but we didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” Chasteen said. “And they don’t know if it’s going to get any better next year. Right now everyone is battling for paint, and no one is getting it.”

Mike Seeley, global marketing director for Texas-based Ennis Traffic Safety Solutions, the nation’s largest distributor of road paint, said a series of misfortunes with its suppliers left it short on supplies to make paint and thermoplastics, a durable alternative used in place of paint for road striping.

“This shortage is not just a national phenomenon; it’s a global phenomenon,” Seeley said.

According to Seeley, Dow Chemical, a global leader in the manufacturing of  acrylic resin, which holds paint together and gives it strength, experienced a mechanical failure that prevented it from making the material.

Thermoplastics also suffered when a U.S. manufacturing plant shut down due to financial difficulties and flooding in China destroyed pine trees that were used for production of a necessary resin.

“We’re catching up as quickly as we can,” Seeley said. “As soon as the materials come in, we’re making paint and shipping it out. Hopefully it will stay warmer long enough into the fall for people to continue to get striping work done.”

Kanub said the paint shortage is critical because of timing. Even if counties do receive paint soon, weather may not accommodate work to paint stripes or lay down thermoplastics.

“We’re going to really be in trouble (because) our window to paint is very limited. Once we start getting rain and moisture on the road, we’re done,” Kanub said.

Clackamas County recently received some paint, but according to Dave Watson, a road operations supervisor, it is “too little too late.”

Watson said the county has received approximately one-third of the amount of paint it needs to finish its road projects. As a result, crews have had to leapfrog around the county to paint small, prioritized patches here and there. The approach is more expensive than scheduling work on one large area at a time, Watson said.

The Oregon Department of Transportation is doing a number of things to overcome the paint shortage, spokesman Dave Thompson said. It is looking into new paints to see if they can be combined to reach a quality level adequate for road striping.

“We may expand the paints we allow temporarily,” Thompson said.

ODOT also is trying out a different spacing pattern. Instead of painting 10-foot-long stripes with 30-foot gaps in-between, ODOT is trying 8-foot-long stripes with 32-foot gaps in-between.

Kanub said that although the lack of paint has affected Washington County’s workload significantly, road crews are still placing reflective buttons on roads and marking crosswalks and school crossings, which use different materials than road striping.