Forecasters suggest the Westcountry could be about to experience the perfect conditions for the creation of potholes: a deluge followed by a penetrating frost.
Council chiefs fear that this damaging combination of weather patterns could provide a major setback to efforts to repair the region's crumbling roads.
A major survey in January revealed the huge network contains an average of 5.2 potholes for every mile, a massive 65,000 ruptures and breaches throughout the 12,500 miles in Devon and Cornwall.
Local authorities need as much as £10.5 billion to bring Britain's "crumbling roads" back to a good condition, according to a report published just a week ago.
Councils in England and Wales filled in more than two million potholes last year – a 29% increase on 2011, the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) calculated.
At the height of the "crisis" in 2010, following a similar downpour followed by a prolonged cold snap, Devon County Council, the authority which oversees the longest road network in the country with some 8,000 miles, repaired a staggering 200,000 potholes.
But despite those efforts, torrential rainfall brought large scale disruption at the end of November last year, dumping more than a month's worth of rain in just eight days.
This has left councillors in Devon, where six bridges were lost, scratching their heads as to how they are going to find much of the £13 million needed to shore up the roads.
The council's cabinet member for Highways Stuart Hughes yesterday said there was concern that the huge effort and expenditure could be about to face another setback. "We had made real progress tackling the numbers of potholes which had reached unprecedented levels after three harsh winters in a row," he added.
"If there is still a lot of water run-off on the roads and the weather turns cold again as forecast, we could see problems with ice which will intensify the damage and weaken the roads further."
In Cornwall, where frosts tend to be rarer and the road network smaller than its neighbours at around 4,500 miles, the council has filled in 7,802 potholes potholes in the ten months since the drought broke last April, but fresh damage caused in November and December could drain an extra £7 million.
With each pothole repair costing somewhere between £80 and £130, the authority said managing the problem amid harsh central Government grant cuts of as much as 28% was "challenging".
A spokesman for Cornwall Council said: "Our priority is to identify and repair potholes and damage to the county's principal routes.
"However, these are challenging times for local authorities, with a substantial cut in government funding already placing pressure on our budget.
"This has not been helped by the prolonged poor weather conditions throughout 2012 which accelerated the rate of damage to roads and created many more potholes."
Devon County Council was handed a share of a £100 million fund set up by the Labour Government in 2011, after the winter freeze of 2010. It received £12.9 million in Winter Damage Grants from the Department for Transport in 2010 and 2011, funding about 800 road report schemes across Devon, covering 80 miles of roads in more than 50 communities.
In 2011 the council repaired 130,000 potholes, down a third on the previous year.
The authority predicts it may have to find up to £10 million to keep up with the worsening surface damage, a figure which Conservative leader John Hart, admitted members "don't know" where to find. On the rails, Network Rail reported problems yesterday, with a branch line closed near Newton Abbot and a flood warning outside Exeter.
