The City is currently involved in its 2005 street maintenance program. At the moment, we’ve got private contractors busy doing “chip seal” projects. Chip seal projects involve putting a sticky black tar on the streets, dumping small rock chips on the tar, and then rolling the mixture into the street with heavy equipment to permanently stick the rock chips to the street. The purpose of this process is to add a new surface to the street which will add to the long-term condition of the street surface. It’s a pretty standard street maintenance activity.
We have stockpiled the rock chips used for the chip seal projects at the Cedar Ridge Elementary School parking lot. This is a photo of the stockpile site. The piles of chipped rocks are loaded into dump trucks at this site by a front end loader and then trucked to the streets that are part of the project.
This is a photo of the Cedar Ridge stockpile site taken from Braxton Drive. The berm and the trees hide public view of most of the pile of rocks.
The orange colored vehicles are the heavy rollers that are used to roll the rock chips into the black tar material that is used to affix the rocks into the surface of the existing street.
This a photo of the completed street surface. It’s a light shade of gray.
We’ve had some concerns expressed by citizens who live in the neighborhood around Cedar Ridge Elementary School. They are hearing and watching the constant stream of dump trucks coming in and out of the parking lot. There is no doubt that this process adds an element of unpleasantness to an otherwise very nice neighborhood. However, the unpleasantness is short in duration; it’s necessary to complete an important street maintenance project; and the safety of it is being monitored daily by our Police Department and our Street Division employees.
Weather permitting, it’ll all be over by the end of next week.
