Newly paved Schenectady streets already showing cracks

Potholes are forming on Schenectady’s newly paved streets.

The damage jolted city officials, who had said the new pavement should last at least a decade. The roads were paved using a new, much cheaper method, which allowed the city to fix most of the main roads in only a few years.

Seeing cracks appear wasn’t encouraging, but the roads just need more maintenance than those paved in the traditional way, City Engineer Chris Wallin said. He’s organized a new schedule to make sure the roads are maintained yearly now.

The problem stems from how the roads were paved. Machines melt the top inch of the pavement, add oil and mix it into a smooth new surface. Any damage deeper than one inch was not repaired.

“Any cracks that were under there, those cracks were [coming] up,” Wallin said.

Traditional paving would have fixed those problems because the street is ripped up and rebuilt from the foundation, but that’s much more expensive. For the price of one mile of rebuilt road, the city could use the new method to pave about 10 miles.

On some of those roads, cracks bubbled up through the new pavement and were left untouched, letting water into the road. That led to the potholes, Wallin said.

“We didn’t seal them in time,” he said. “The first line of defense is crack sealing.”

This year, crews will seal all the roads that were paved in 2014, he added, “because we don’t want issues like that.”

And a system will help.

“What we had before was, we had the crews going out and if they saw a street in poor shape, they might crack seal it,” he said. “We’ve [now] provided them with lists.”

The crews were also hampered by an old sealing machine. In the fall, the city bought a new machine for $36,000, which will come out of state funding for Schenectady’s paving program.

The new machine is so much easier to use that crews sealed seven miles of road last year, Wallin said. In 2013, the crews sealed only one mile.

But that means there are probably more roads that need to be sealed. In 2011 and 2012, the city used the new system to pave almost 20 miles of roads.

When the snow melts, Wallin plans to drive all of the roads that were paved in 2011 to make sure every crack is sealed.

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