New Machine Helps Whitfield County Repair Potholes Around The Clock, Even In The Winter

“Dad, on our next vacation, can we all go watch a pothole being repaired in the road?”

 

“Gee, son, I thought you had your heart set on going to Walley World next summer. But if that’s what you really want to do, we’ll change our plans.”

 

“Wow, Dad, you’re the best!”

 

Okay, so that conversation will probably never happen.

 

Admittedly, watching a pothole being fixed might not sound nearly as exciting as throwing your hands in the air while riding down a 100-foot-high hill on  a roller coaster.

 

Just try telling that to the driver who doesn’t have to slam on his brakes suddenly to dodge a hole in the road, thanks to the pothole patcher purchased last year by Whitfield County Public Works.

 

Director DeWayne Hunt and his crew recently showed off just what the innovative machine can do for an eager group of fellow Georgia District 7 Public Works Association members.

 

As the hot summer sun beat down on the heads of the curious on-lookers from neighboring towns, it took just a few minutes for a small group of Whitfield County workers to repair two large potholes in the parking lot of the Dalton Convention Center, where the association’s meeting was held.

 

“There’s a number of reasons it made sense for us to buy the pothole patcher,” Mr.

Hunt explained later. 

 

“Part of the reason is that in the wintertime, the asphalt plant is closed. You just can’t ask them to crank up for six tons of asphalt if that’s all you need for patching. They’re used to running hundreds and thousands of tons a day.”

 

If they do manage to buy the asphalt from the plant, keeping it warm becomes a problem.

 

“When you pick it up early in the morning, say at 8 o’clock, it begins to cool off during the day and doesn’t work the same way,” Mr. Hunt says. “You end up with a sticky, hard pile of asphalt in the back of the truck that you’ve kinda got to chip out of there.”

 

No such problem with the new pothole patcher.

 

“We wanted to be able to internally fix a pothole,” Mr. Hunt says. “It’s such a simple piece of roadwork – a pothole, dig it out, fill it back up with some adequate product, and get it where it’s trafficable.”

 

Says Mr. Hunt, the county wanted to be able to fix potholes instantly 24 hours a day, seven days a week “because we feel like that’s one of the main functions of Public Works.”

 

Especially since a pothole can do a lot of damage to people’s cars and cause them to swerve out of the road.

 

“Just being able to repair that basic need for the county” makes the pothole patcher invaluable, Mr. Hunt says.

 

“This machine gives us a thousand pounds of asphalt in 30 minutes,” he says, “and we’re able to do that numerous times a day, 10 to 15 times a day maybe, and so we can get out and do a lot of pothole repair.”

 

In the past, the county used a bagged product called Cold Mix to repair potholes in cold weather.

 

“It works okay,” Hunt says, “but eventually it doesn’t bond together like asphalt and it breaks up. It’s just a temporary patch, so we end up having to make permanent repairs several months later.”

 

With the pothole patcher, though, the county approaches the repair differently.

 

“We’re not just filling that hole up,” Hunt says. “We’re digging it out first, we’re filling it up with six to eight inches of rock underneath, and then we’re putting about a two to three-inch layer of asphalt across the top of that. That way, we build the pothole back very similar to a standard road section.”

 

Each week, crew leader Daniel Morgan and a two-man team haul the machine to a different section of the county.

 

“So about once a month, we’re either in the north end, the south end, the east side, or the west side,” Mr. Hunt explains. “If we don’t have any work orders within an area, we’ll go back to one of the other areas that might have two or three pressing work orders. We try to stay on top of the work orders as  hard as we can because of the impact on traffic.”

 

Anytime there is a pothole in the road, it can be a driving hazard, or water can continue to penetrate the asphalt and just make the hole bigger. “So then rather than fixing a pothole, we’ve got to take a whole section of road and repair it,” he says.

 

Hunt believes the pothole patcher allows the county to respond to potholes faster as well as making a better repair, with a good seal that keeps water from penetrating underneath the road again.

 

Not very many neighboring counties are using a pothole patcher, he says.

 

“The most popular type of equipment for that kind of work is what’s known as a pothole truck,” he says. “They claim it’s a one-man operation. He sprays some air and cleans out a pothole, but he doesn’t do any physical work to the pothole. He’s literally just shooting gravel in it, tar, gravel, tar, just filling up the existing hole. It’s really a temporary patch.”

 

Mr. Hunt believes the pothole patcher is a better value.

 

“The machine cost us $90,000,” he says. “Each time we fill a hole, our cost per hole goes down. Say, if we have 90 potholes, that’s a thousand dollars to go fix it. And we’re gonna have way more than 90 so every time we fill up a pothole, the cost-per on the machine drops steadily.”

 

Mr. Hunt also says the county will save money over the old system by not having to go back and make permanent repairs.

 

“You’ll always be able to see the repair, but once we put the rock underneath and get that pavement down on the top, we don’t see any reason to go back,” he says. “The repair is just as strong as the road it’s sitting beside, and on some of our older roads, the repair is actually stronger. Some of the old roads don’t have any rock underneath the asphalt, so when we put the patch in, the pothole patch is the best part of the road.”

 

With 718 miles of roads to maintain in the county, Mr. Hunt says the county will always have plenty of use for the pothole patcher.

 

“We’re always going to have blemishes in our roads,” he admits, “either from utility cuts or traffic that wasn’t designed to be on that particular old road, or just where water does get under the road and we have typical potholes. With the amount of roads we’ve got, we’re always going to be working on paving a road somewhere, and that’s why this pothole patcher is a handy piece of equipment for us.”