By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – For a few hundred feet, Old Greene Road is as polite as can be – a smooth ribbon of well-behaved asphalt that’s kind to cars, trucks and front-end alignments.

Go a little farther, however, and it forgets its manners. Genteel pavement gives way to a pothole-scarred, frost-heave-ridden stretch threatening hefty repair bills to any driver who dares it.

This winter’s weird warmth has created especially bad roads. A rainy thaw in January allowed more water to burrow under the roads.

“Then it froze again, and now we’ve got the problems,” said Jon Elie, a district team manager for Lewiston Public Works.

Like all locals, he knows the worst spots in town.

It’s his job to find them and scramble together the crews to fix them.

He’s been fielding a lot of calls the past few weeks from people who drive on Old Greene Road.

“It’s bad up there, and people just bottom out,” he said. “Even when you’re familiar with the road and you know what’s coming, it’s easy to forget. And they just hit those things and go flying.”

There are other horrid roads – just ask people on No Name Pond Road or Old Chadbourne Road or Summer Street in Auburn. Those roads are so bumpy that they look like the pavement stops in some spots.

Part of the problem is the roads themselves. City crews are seeing most of the problems on the more rural roads that are due for serious overhauls.

The more mannerly parts of Old Greene Road have had recent work done, and it shows. But it’s been years since crews have worked the worst parts.

“We’re not talking just putting down asphalt,” Elie said. “Anybody can make a road black, but it takes some serious work to fix it so it keeps looking that way.”

Serious repairs on any roads will wait until mid-May, when plants begin making hot asphalt again. In the meantime, crews are limited to using cold patch – a mix of tar, old asphalt and gravel – to fill in holes.

“That really doesn’t stop the problem,” Elie said. “Cars can come along and knock that out, and it does let the water get in.”

The answer is to rebuild the roads, but that’s expensive. City budgets only allow crews to do a few miles at a time. Old Chadbourne Road is scheduled for reconstruction this summer, he said.

To really fix a road, crews need to start from scratch. That means removing every layer of asphalt and the gravel beneath, and putting in new drains and catch basins. New gravel or rock goes in next, followed by the asphalt.

The fix is designed to drain water away from the road base.

“Water is the enemy of any construction work, especially roads,” Elie said. It squeezes into cracks when it’s warm and expands as it freezes. That makes roads rise up and turns cracks in the pavement into car-jolting potholes.

In some parts of town, the entire road heaves and drivers never notice.

“Everything has the same cruddy drainage and the same silty sand so that when one part goes up 6 inches, so does everything else,” Elie said.

Copy the Story Link