A road crew from the town highway department was out on East Ridge filling potholes with cold patch on Monday. From left are Robert Sommerer, Jim Fortin and Evo Falcinelli. —Macklin Reid photo
Arctic cold, lots of snow, and frost that’s gone deep down — it’s been a tough winter for Ridgefield’s roads.
“This winter has wreaked havoc with our roads,” First Selectman Rudy Marconi said Tuesday.
The frost, water getting down into the roads, that’s what really does it, according to town Public Works Director Peter Hill.
“As it freezes, it expands, which causes the road to heave, which causes cracks in the road, and then the water gets into those, and that’s what causes your asphalt to expand, and pieces start to break away, and that’s how your potholes develop.” he said. “There’s nothing to prevent that from happening — unfortunately, there’s not. That’s just the price you pay for living in New England.”
And with potholes, all there is to do is fill them.
“We’re patching those as fast as we can now,” Mr. Hill said. “We’re working on it every day.”
Knowing it was a a bad winter — the second bad winter in a row — the selectmen, who mostly cut budgets, took the unusual step of adding $1 million to Mr. Hill’s budget for road repairs.
The road work budget line — called “capital projects financing” for reasons not worth explaining — is $1,850,000 this year. A request for $2 million was in the budget the selectmen received. And the board upped that to $3 million — a 62% increase in a budget where nearly everything else is in the 2% to 4% range.
“The amount of damage caused by severe frost this winter has caused many more situations that need new pavement,” Mr. Marconi said.
“It is those areas that we are allocating an additional $1 million to address,” he said.
“And we could probably use $2 million more.”
The money — if it makes it through an approval process that still includes the finance board and the voters — means more miles of road should get repaved this summer.
“There’s about eight miles on our list now,” Mr. Hill said. “And we’ll probably be adding possibly another five miles with the additional money they gave us.”
Paving eight miles — or even eight plus another five — isn’t that big a bite.
Ridgefield has about 190 miles of roads, according to Mr. Hill — 169 miles of “town” road and another 20 or so miles of private roads that, nonetheless, get some care from the town.
$94 a ton
The road reconstruction and repaving is done mostly by outside firms that have plants to make the asphalt, machines to lay it down, and other machines to mill down the old road surface before the new asphalt is put on.
“Contractors do milling and paving,” Mr. Hill said. “They have the machines for that.”
Asphalt isn’t cheap.
“It’s about $94 a ton. That’s in place,” Mr. Hill said. “That’s put down, with the machine.
“There’s labor involved, trucking to get the material.”
Road repairs can be done to different levels. There’s repaving; milling, or grinding down the old road, and then paving; and there’s full reclamation, which involves rebuilding the road base.
Some roads are in pretty good shape, Mr. Marconi said, but it’s worth it to put another thin layer of asphalt on them to extend their life.
“A skim coat, a one-inch layer of asphalt,” he said.
“Then comes the milling and paving — you just do one two-inch layer, after it’s milled.
“And the final is reclaiming. When you reclaim, you remove the asphalt, rework the base, do compaction, and then do two layers — an inch-and-a-half binder, with an inch-and-a-half top course.”
What roads?
One of the things the Highway Department will be doing soon is deciding which roads get what kind of work.
With the budget-supporting material Mr. Hill turned in some time ago came a list of 24 roads identified as “paving candidates,” with 11 highlighted as likely to be done.
The likely candidates included Belvedere Court, Dowling Drive, Hulda Lane, Lantern Drive, Limekiln Road, North Street from 116 to Wooster Street, Remington Road, Rock Spring Lane, Taunton Hill Road, Titicus Court, and Wooster Street.
With more money in the budget, Mr. Hill will be looking at other roads to decide which ones to add to the list.
“I have few in mind already,” he said. “Cains Hill, that’s a mess. Barrack Hill.”
There are others that will come under consideration.
“East Ridge, Grove Street, North Street, Wooster Street, Copps Hill Road, that’s really bad,” Mr. Hill said.
While most of the paving and milling is done by contractors, the town highway crew — 16 workers in a 28-person public works department — does some repaving, particularly on smaller roads, with a machine borrowed from Redding.
Preparation work
The town crew also does the bulk of the preparation.
“Catch basin repairing, pipe installation, catch basin installation,” Mr. Hill said.
“Cutting brush, sweeping the roads, fixing the drainage, cutting the gutters — we do that ourselves,” he said, adding that “80% of prep work for paving is the town crew.
“We have a couple of crews that work on the roads that are going to be repaved, and then we have a couple of crews that are working on the rest of the roads — general maintenance, sweeping the roads, a Vactor sucking out catch basins,” he said. “We usually have a crew out replacing curbing that’s gotten damaged over the winter.
“Not all the guys are working on paving roads,” he added. “We have roads that have catch basins that have collapsed, we do that type of work, too. We have over 6,000 catch basins in town.”
Replacing road drainage systems is important.
“There’s no sense repaving the road if you can’t put drainage in, or repair the existing drainage,” Mr. Hill said.
“That’s one of the key components of keeping a road in good shape,” he said. “Water is one of the worst things for asphalt. If you address the drainage problems, your road will last a lot longer.”
Although it’s clear the roads have had a bad winter, Mr. Hill said, a true assessment of the damage won’t come until it’s warmed up.
Some road may not be as bad as they seem now.
“We’ve got to wait until the frost comes out of the ground and see just how bad they are,” he said.
“Right now we’ve got a lot of frost heaves, which make the roads look worse than they really are — with the frost heaves and humps and bumps you feel like you’re on a roller-coaster.
“When the frost goes away, the roads will come back down again. You’ll see a big difference,” he said.
“But some of the road will be damaged by it, but they won’t be quite as bad as they are now. …
“We’ll get a true assessment once the frost has come out of the ground and all the snow’s melted along the edges.”
Bad, yes, but has this winter been one of the worst?
“Temperature-wise, yes. Snow-wise, no,” Mr. Hill said. “It’s been extremely cold.”
There’s been a lot of snow, but not a crazy amount.
“What’s worse is the frost,” Mr. Hill said. “As long as it’s cold you’re going to get frost in the ground. This year, because we didn’t have any snow up until the middle of January, things got pretty deep.
“I was talking to one of the guys from Aquarion. He said there’s almost four feet of frost in the ground. He’s been there 30 years. He said this is the worst he’d ever seen it.
“So,” Mr. Hill said, “that makes for bad roads.”