This year, Highway Superintendent Jason Monroe of Chestertown, NY made changes to the road maintenance program after facing the same problem time and time again. Between the lack of funding available through his town highway budget and from state “CHIPS” funds, and the growing road base failures repairs by using a typical hot mix overlay, he proactively took a different approach.
Jason chose to take a more invasive, yet environmentally friendly approach to repair the roadways with failing bases. He opted to recycle the roadways with base failures using the full depth reclamation process. Full depth Reclamation (also known as FDR) utilizes an in-depth recycling machine that grinds the road in place, pulverizes the existing material, then creates a base mix by injecting either foamed asphalt, cement, asphalt emulsions, or calcium chloride into the pulverized material and places it back into the roadway to create a brand new base with the existing road. The process allows the roadway to be reprofiled and greatly improves the load-carrying ability of the sub-base as well. The new base then has a wearing course placed over it.
Once the new road base was in place the less traveled roads were cost effectively double chip sealed and the higher volume roads had a hot mix overlay placed. The change in Chestertown was a win/win for everyone. Stronger roads and more miles were completed and the budget remained the same. Kudos to Jason for thinking outside the box, and keeping Chestertown’s roadway infrastructure safe, steady, as well as environmentally friendly!
Jay Castimore, Peckham Materials Corp.