Chip seal roads may be the future

MAT-SU — Drivers in the Mat-Su Borough could be forgiven if they assumed there were just two types of road — gravel and paved.

But for the past four years the borough has been experimenting with a third type — chip seal. According to the chip seal demonstration project’s manager, Chuck Kaucic, this year’s batch of roads paved with chip seal was the best yet.

“This year was exceptional,” he said. “The chip seal that we have on the ground is the best it gets.”

The roads done this year were Hidden Hills Road in the Caswell Lakes area, Roberts Road in Willow and Willow Senior Housing Access, also in Willow.

Chip seal, according to Billy Connor, director of the Alaska University Transportation Center who has been working with the borough on the project, is a lot like the more typical paving product — asphalt concrete paving — just cheaper, thinner and less durable.

And it’s nothing new. Kaucic said a lot of other states used chip seal on their old county roads. Connor said New Zealand uses almost nothing but chip seal.

For the borough, it represents a middle way that might be ideal for roads that don’t handle a lot of traffic. And it could help stretch road dollars further. Kaucic said the demonstration, it was hoped, would find fertile ground with the borough’s various road service area boards. Those boards consist of borough-appointed volunteers who decide what projects to embark upon in their neighborhoods. The demonstration project, he said, would hopefully prove to those volunteers that chip sealing was a viable option that could bring pavement to more areas.

“We were trying to prove it to ourselves, too,” Kaucic said.

According to a borough press release, chip seal costs $140,500 per mile. Asphalt cement costs $250,000. But the oft-quoted figure for how much it costs to pave a road — $1 million per mile — takes into account the cost of laying down a good base that could take the pavement.

And that’s where the borough project is looking to realize the biggest savings on road projects.

“The state, if they were going to put down a chip seal, what they would do is build it exactly like they would (asphalt concrete) but they’d do a chip seal. And the borough can’t afford that,” Connor said.

Kaucic said that the borough, instead, was trying to lay down roads doing as little pre-paving work as possible.

“As opposed to putting down a base that you could put (asphalt concrete) on we were trying to put this on a hard gravel road with minimal sub-base preparation,” he said.

Connor said the goal over the five-year project was to do chip seals on a wide range of roads, from those with very strong bases to those with very weak bases. Some turned out very well. Kaucic cited Buttercup Drive in the Meadow Lakes area.

“It’s held up incredibly,” he said.

At least one didn’t do so great — Crystal Lakes Road in Willow, which was chip sealed two years ago and which the borough press release said will need to have some potholes filled in. But Connor said that wasn’t a surprise — on the spectrum of roads from strong to weak, Crystal Lake was definitely on the weak end.

“We knew that that was a very marginal road,” Connor said.

From here, Connor said, he and the borough intend to look at the data and come up with some kind of document that road service areas and others who make road construction decisions can use in deciding what type of project to embark upon.

“We’re in the process of putting together a set of guidelines, writing down a set of guidelines to guide the borough and the service districts on when they should put down a chip seal,” he said.

Both he and Kaucic said that the whole project is yet another way to stretch road dollars as far as possible.

“If money was not an issue and resources were not an issue then we would probably pave everything,” Connor said. “Since you only have a limited amount of dollars, what you have to do is we have to spend the money to maximize the performance of the entire system.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.