Miss Management: Bumper crops and geosynthetics

February 22, 2010 | Galynn Nordstrom

After more than three weeks of having to remove my teeth from the roof of my car after any commute to or from the workplace, I resolved to look into Minnesota’s perennial pothole problem from a professional standpoint. That’s right: potholes in January. Forget the lack of snow in Vancouver; the statewide emergence of potholes in January, so much earlier than their traditional debut in March when we’re usually close enough to spring to be a little more tolerant of craterous commutes, is surely all the proof we need of global warming. (It’s like comparing the pain of childbirth to that of wearing clip earrings for extended periods of time. There simply is no realistic scale for both.)

For those blessed with less wildly variable climates, potholes are caused by the freeze-thaw cycle allowing water to seep between cracks and underneath pavements, ultimately causing sizeable chunks of asphalt to pop out of the roadway, leaving holes that can make a 1995 Saturn fear for its hubcaps on a daily basis. Turning to specialty fabrics for a solution—as always—I went to www.geosyntheticsmagazine.com and searched the magazine’s archives for “pavement repair.”

Turns out there are quite a number of geosynthetic solutions for both constructing and repairing roadways. The situation can be summed up by analyses in Geosynthetics magazine, reporting on a comprehensive study of pavement repair materials and methods: “The pavement assessments aren’t the only thing that’s new. The study is also the first to draw broad-ranging conclusions about the economic benefit of paving fabric interlayers. In the past, some DOTs and other local entities have chosen not to utilize paving fabrics, viewing them as an unnecessary extra cost. However, this study shows that incorporating a paving fabric interlayer is always a cost-competitive repair strategy. On a road in a typical “needs repair” condition, the paving fabric repair strategy clearly gives the most bang for the construction buck.” (The survey was sponsored by Propex Fabrics, TC Mirafi, SI Geosolutions and Nevown (now TNS Advanced Technologies), as a special project under the Geosynthetic Materials Association.)

Maybe now’s the time for a flurry of technically savvy and economically forceful letters to the editor of the Minneapolis-St. Paul StarTribune, to help turn the infrastructure funding discussion away from partisan politics and toward finding more efficient ways to keep Minnesota’s population from completely losing its axles.

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