MORGANTOWN — Two Monongalia County delegates and two roads experts set out recently for the second part of their county pothole tour — bouncing along roads in the eastern part of the county.
Delegates Barbara Evans Fleischauer and Rodney Pyles joined with Abby and Chris Childs, owner and engineer, respectively, for Salem-based Inca Roads, a roadway engineering and inspection firm. Delegates Evan Hansen, Danielle Walker and John Williams were unable to join this time.
The result of the two kidney-jarring jaunts will be an Emergency Road Assessment — ERA prepared by Abby Childs. An ERA is “a fast, low-cost, and simplified method for prioritizing roadways according to repair needs and accounting for high-severity distress quantities.”
The report will be prepared at no cost and presented to the delegates, Chris Childs previously said, “to get some data to them, and help as both citizens and business owners. Our interest is both personal and professional.”
The report will include an assessment of Jakes Run, the worst of the roads from their West Mon tour in March, and an East Mon road they haven’t selected yet. One road — Little Falls — was the worst but is less densely populated and more lightly traveled than most of the others.
The delegates then plan to meet with Division of Highways representatives to discuss the report.
Chris Childs took the wheel of Inca’s white Chevy Suburban and everyone else piled in. The tour began in earnest with a turn off W.Va. 7 east onto Tyrone Road and a brief spur onto Brookhaven Road.
On Brookhaven, Childs stopped the Suburban at one point for everyone to take a look at a developing slide. Alligator cracks were forming a crescent a good 30 feet long. “Any crescent-shape cracking is showing you that material is moving,” he said. The crescent ends point toward the direction the ground is shifting.
Returning to the van, they returned to Tyrone Road and turned onto Fields Park Road, where poorly filled potholes were evident. “They threw some material in the holes and ran it over,” Childs said.
Fleischauer observed, “This is bad. I bet it was really bad before they did this. But it’s still bad.”
South Pierpont and Pleasant Hill roads were worse, leading to observations of not only inadequate maintenance but poor road construction. Fleischauer commented, “You wouldn’t think that this is the most prosperous county in the state.”
Long ruts led to a stretch with portions having no asphalt at all, just gravel. “You’ll get wheel rutting,” Childs said. Then you’ll get alligator cracking. As those pieces separate and become individual chunks, they ravel out” and the asphalt washes away.
One answer to avoid worsening cracks, both Childses said, is sealing them with liquid asphalt, a common practice in neighboring Pennsylvania, where they still work and previously kept an office.
“I’ve never seen them seal any cracks here, never,” said Abby Childs.
They stopped at a townhouse complex on Pleasant Hill Road to examine a stretch cracked, rutted and potholed.
Simply overlaying it with new asphalt, Chris Childs said, won’t help. The cracked pieces underneath will keep expanding and contracting and cause reflective cracking in the overlay. To properly fix it, DOH needs to dig down and build a base.
Immediately adjacent to this stretch, on the other side of the narrow lane, sits a long rectangular concrete patch, probably done by a utility company, Childs said. It was cut square, filled and compressed. “That wasn’t done by the DOH.”
Back in the van, the contrast between the two patch jobs led the Childses to talk about the difference in repair work done by the gas companies on the roads they tear up in Pennsylvania and other parts of West Virginia, and work done by the DOH. “It’s not the district, it’s who it’s done by,” Chris said.
“They do it right,” Abby said of the gas companies.
The tour led back to Tyrone Road, then onto Mayfield Road, where improper ditching was leaving water on the surface and Fleischauer commented, ‘This is barely a road. It’s barely a driveway”
The next part of the tour included loops on Lower Aaron’s Creek and Aaron’s Creek roads, and Cobun Creek Road; where reservoir construction traffic appears to be tearing up portions at either end.
The final leg of the trip led down Little Falls Roads, which sits just past the intersection of Smithtown and Goshen roads, a stone’s throw from a DOH Mon County office.
The narrow residential road winds 1.7 miles down to the Monongahela River and a rail-trail parking site.
“This has been bad for years, but it’s really bad right now,” Fleischauer said. The going was slow, with constant weaving around those potholes that could be avoided, and slowing to a near stop to crawl through those that couldn’t. The 1.7 miles took 10 minutes to traverse.
One stretch was patched; a tree trunk jutting horizontally out of the woods to the edge of the road suggests the patching followed the tree fall.
At another spot, they parked to observe a 100-yard-plus stretch of potholes, cracks, missing asphalt and flooded roadside. They measured one big enough for one of them to lay in: about 4 inches deep, 7 feet long and 4 feet wide.
Fixing the road properly, Childs said, would require milling it and leaving the milled asphalt in place, regrading it, compacting it and covering it with 2.5 to 3 inches of asphalt with 19 mm aggregate in it.
“It would hold up for a long time,” he said.
But given its level of use, all agreed, it probably wouldn’t be a priority for a report or for the DOH.
Twitter David Beard @dbeardtdp
DBeard@DominionPost.com
