The Bobcat picks up around a storm drain.
Dave Lawlor wants you to understand that a road is like your roof: When it gets old and tired enough, you have take off the various crumbling or degraded layers, get down to the plywood, that is the surface below.
Then you tack on a whole new roof — or in the case of Quinnipiac Avenue, a fresh hot new layer of asphalt.
Welcome to the milling and paving season in New Haven, which was in full swing early Tuesday as longtime Department of Public Works staffer Lawlor was supervising a five-person crew from Bloomfield-based Garrity Asphalt Reclaiming on an eighth-mile stretch of Quinnipiac Avenue roughly between Hemingway Drive and Essex Street.
This year the milling and paving is being done in two waves, with 21 streets to be worked on from the end of June to the beginning of July. Then in a second wave 21 more streets are to be milled and paved between August and September. Which streets are worked on and in which order is decided on by a group called the Resource Allocation Committee, comprised of city staffers and alders, with assignments for work made based on priorities of need. (Click here to see the list.)
The season started this week, with the milling.
Allan Appel Photo
Dave Lawlor beside a milled portion of Quinnipiac Avenue.
The centerpiece of the action on Quinnipiac Tuesday was a $750,000 reclaiming or milling machine operated by Garrity’s Phil Sanchez and another crew member. They held it aloft as the milling machine moved like a noisy and determined mechanical brontosaurus on a tank-like track. The rotary of teeth in the machine’s belly churned up the old road into its asphalt fragments.
Those fragments were shot via a long conveyor belt into a dump truck that moved slowly ahead of the reclaimer.
The rest of the caravan included a quick-turning little Bobcat picking up the millings, along with any chunks, and behind that a smaller milling machine to work on areas around storm drains and other structures, and, finally, a sweeper.
“It’s a lot like a roof. You can only get two or three layers, and then it’ll blow through,” Lawlor said.
For the nine years he’s been on the job, Lawlor said, the city’s DPW has worked with Garrity’s team because it saves money not owning and maintaining such expensive machinery.
Tuesday’s work included only the milling, taking up and reclaiming the old road. Then the paving will be undertaken in a couple of weeks by New Britain-based Tilcon Connecticut, which will cart the debris to a dump site at Hamden Public Works department.
The milling or “reclaiming” machine fills up a dump truck, astonishgly, every three minutes. The milling is rightly called “reclaiming” because Hamden is using the material to pave the roadway at their dump. And New Haven’s DPW saves a portion of the milled or churned up old road to use for road patching and other temporary construction purposes.
“The awesome part of milling is that we keep some of it for ourselves,” Miller said.
The three-quarter-million-dollar Garrity reclaimer lumbers down the avenue.
The work Tuesday involved two sections of Quinnipiac Avenue and later in the day Warwick Street. The team does approximately three streets a day during the milling and paving season, which runs roughly from April to November.
When the Garrity crew finishes its work, Lawlor and DPW colleague Luis Sanchez, will paint the storm drains and other raised structures orange, so they are visible. Then they’ll deploy the “Rough Road” signs. Drivers will be able to use the roads without damaging the milled preparatory surface pending the arrival of the paving operation.
The final piece of the project for each of the newly paved roads is striping, which is done by the city department of Traffic, Parking & Transportation.
Lawlor said the ideal look of the road after milling is a fluted or grooved surface, so that a “tack” or a kind of super glue can be laid down by the crews to come, enabling the asphalt to adhere as strongly as possible.
“It adheres to the asphalt, not the dirt, and keeps the road in place,” he said.
Monday the crew did Norwood Road and Melrose Street. Wednesday the list calls for the milling of Hillside Avenue, off Main Street, Raynham Road, and Hyde Street in the Annex and Morris Cove.
When the work on Quinnipiac and Warwick ends, the caravan, with police escort, plans to move slowly towards that neighborhood, where the mechanical brontosaurus and attendant vehicles spend the night, staged for the beginning of work early in the morning.