New item-Covington
From time to time, we like to focus on innovations some governments are doing to improve their environments. In downtown Covington, Hendricks Street started showing serious signs of wear and the city of Covington Transportation Department embarked on a repaving process unlike others, according to information provided by the city.
“Because of the uniqueness of the streets in downtown Covington, traditional repaving methods won’t last long,” said Ken Swain, transportation manager for the city of Covington. “We had to get creative and develop a process that would utilize the existing concrete substructure of the street, but accept modern pavement on top, while being budget minded.”
The process involves milling the top two inches of asphalt off of the underlying concrete, according to the city.
Next the joints between pieces of concrete were ‘tacked’ with an adhesive. Then a layer of leveling asphalt one-half inch thick was laid, followed by felt reinforcing material over each joint placed in a crosshatch pattern. Lastly, a 1 ½ in layer of asphalt was laid over the entire street.
“Concrete is a very rigid compound and easily transfers its failures, or problems, to the flexible asphalt” Swain said. “This method of repairing the street was much more cost effective than taking the entire street down to dirt and starting over.”
Update-Snellville
Last week we told you about a Snellville resident upset about a sinkhole on Pennistone Way.
“My neighbors and I have contacted the city of Snellville and Gwinnett Department of Water Resources numerous times over the last few weeks about the sinkhole over the existing sanitary sewer line. As you can see the city dumped some asphalt cold patch in one of the holes. The settlement in the pavement is getting worse and Gwinnett County DWR stated that they are looking into it,” said Jerry Oberholzer.
We sent the item to the city who sent back a quick explanation.
“We as a city do not provide water and sewer services. We have been trying to work with GWR, who’s maintenance problem this is, to repair the issue fully. They have now finally made an adequate size cut in the roadway, after their hopefully long term line repair, that a good resurfacing job will provide more than a short term fix to the problem. I apologize to Jerry and the other neighbors for the delay, but it’s an inter-jurisdictional issue where we have no direct authority. Judging by the amount of street patches in the area, GWR has a history of maintenance issues in this area.
Days on list-2
Who’s looking into it: City of Senellville City Manager Butch Sanders, bsanders@snellville.org
A city of Snellville technician took a look at this shortly after the AJC contacted the city and found no problem. Snelllville followed up the next day and also found that all the equipment was working properly. There is video detection at this intersection and the city says the cameras are working properly. The city adjusted the detection zone slightly by making it a little bigger and maybe that will pick up the vehicles a little better.
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