I-795 repair begins
By Steve Herring
Published in News on October 22, 2008 1:46 PM
News-Argus/GREG SOUSA
Road crews from Delta Contracting begin stripping away sections of pavement to make way for some new asphalt on Interstate 795 in Goldsboro this morning.
A $626,000 preventative maintenance winterization project on Interstate 795 between Goldsboro and Pikeville got under way Monday morning, and motorists can expect to encounter work crews along the highway's outer northbound and southbound lanes over the next two to three weeks.
Sections of the highway will be stripped and new asphalt laid.
Work in the outer southbound lane will be between mile markers 89.5 and 92.1, the area where some patching already has been done, and 94.8 and 95.
Work in the outer northbound lane will be between mile markers 88.7 and 89.1, 90.2 and 90.4 and 94.7 and 95.2.
The outside lanes will be closed in one direction at a time.
Some of the work will be in the southbound lane just north of Goldsboro near where the state already has been forced to patch the crumbling highway even though it has been open for less than three years.
There has been no official word as to the cause of that crumbling, but speculation at the time was that the asphalt was not thick enough to handle the volume of traffic.
A federal report on the problem is expected within the next few weeks.
Not all of the patches in that area were the results of repairs to the asphalt, said Wendi Johnson, construction engineer for Division 4 of the N.C. Department of Transportation. One three-by-four-foot section was removed for study after the crumbling was first reported.
State officials say that while this round of work is a "piece of that problem," the real concern is that water will enter cracks in the highway and freeze, causing the asphalt to crumble even more.
It is not a patching project, she said.
"We are actually removing anywhere from three to five inches of asphalt," she said.
Ms. Johnson said the new asphalt will replace pavement that is cracking. The outside lanes were selected because that is where the most severe cracking has appeared, she said.
Ms. Johnson said the lane sections would be closed overnight because of safety concerns.
She noted that the removal of up to five inches of pavement would create a dropout that could be dangerous. The section will be reopened once it is repaved.