Northwood News ♦ December 2016

Our Roads

By David Rotenstein

In September, after years of broken promises by Montgomery County leaders, work began on rehabilitating our rutted, potholed, and disintegrating roads.  Contractors began the first stage in a two-stage repair program designed to provide our neighborhood with a long-term fix for our crumbling roadways, some of which date to the 1930s.

Randy Paugh, Chief of Pavement Management for the Montgomery County Department of Transportation, and his project manager for our neighborhood, Nick Boone, attended the October NFCCA meeting.  They explained the process by which the county allocates resources to road maintenance and repair and they described the conditions of our roads.

“The PCI [pavement condition index] for your neighborhood is 38.  So we look at 50 as being fair to good, so you’re in the poor range,” Paugh told members October 13.  Our roads were evaluated using methods that included old-fashioned visual inspection, core sampling, and high-tech sensing equipment capable of detecting buried and invisible structural failures beneath the pavement surfaces.

Paugh explained that, to make lasting repairs that will hold for the next 20 years, it takes several steps.  The first step is to use the data collected in the surveys that evaluated conditions to do what’s called “full-depth pavement patching” over more than 17 lane miles of road or 18,000 square yards of patching.

“So what we’re going to do is get this road patched from the sub-grade up, we’re going to do all the way down to the ground and bring it all the way back up,” Paugh said.  “And you’ll have patches.  It will look like a patch quilt, like a blanket, and it will be smooth.  But then we’ll come back next year and we’re going to mill and resurface about two inches on every street.  That’s a commitment.”

Patching crews began in the northern part of the neighborhood and have been working their way down to University Boulevard in a race with the weather.  According to Paugh, all of the patching work must be completed before temperatures drop and average pavement temperatures go below 40 degrees.  Once the patching phase is completed, Paugh assured residents that work on the complete hot mix asphalt repairs would begin during the spring construction season and that it would be completed prior to the end of FY 2016 or June 30, 2017.

Project manager Boone emailed a progress report on the patching before the November NFCCA board meeting.  He wrote that work was proceeding on schedule:  “We are still expecting our contractors to be completed with all of the Base Repairs by sometime within the week of November 28.”  He added, “We are still committed on doing the Residential Resurfacing HMA [hot mix asphalt] Construction phase in the Northwood Park Subdivision for upcoming construction season (2017).”

The NFCCA board invited Councilmember Tom Hucker to our December meeting and his staff accepted the invitation.  We plan to ask Hucker about the status of the patching and we are prepared to discuss any issues you have about the work done to date.  Please attend the meeting December 14 for the latest road update and to bring your questions for Councilmember Hucker.   ■