Highway

Busy Construction Season Ahead

Summer Paving Schedule

- Applications
     - Curb Cut

- Drainage

- Roads

- Sweeping

- Proposed Improvements  

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Busy Construction Season Ahead

Paving Projects

The final course of pavement will be applied to numerous streets in late summer and early fall. These streets include Church Street, School Street, Chestnut Street, Upper Mendon Street, Union Street, Handy Road, Florence Drive North, Roberta Road, and Pickering Road. Drainage upgrades for several of these streets is on-going. In addition, most of the streets in Millerville will be paved as part of the sewer project and the Town will be continuing our crack sealing efforts throughout the summer.

Drainage Projects

The DPW has been inundated with calls pertaining to drainage issues. We are dealing with complaints on a regular basis and addressing issues based on our ability to fix the problem(s) and the severity of each issue. Our efforts are being slowed by the need to constantly fix existing storm drains that have collapsed due to age. Please be patient.

Lincoln Street Bridge

The Town is in the process of designing a bridge to replace the road above the culvert on Lincoln Street near the BMR High School. The design will include a sidewalk and will specify the use of pieces of a temporary bridge being demolished as part of the Central Artery project in Boston. The Town will be receiving four concrete bridge slabs free of charge in June of 2005. We will store these slabs at the DPW facility until the design is approved and construction starts. The savings on the construction project will be over $400,000. The proposed design will preserve the historic culvert structure currently in-place and the bridge regular maintenance, will serve the community for generations to come. Though there is no firm schedule for construction, we are working toward a summer 2006 construction project.

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Summer Paving Schedule

Unlike fine wines, roads do not get better with age. The Town of Blackstone owns and operates nearly 50 miles of roads and it is estimated that it will cost over $4 million to repair, replace, or resurface these roads over the next ten years. Town meeting in May 2004 approved $400,000 in funds to supplement state funding for roadway repairs and to start the first phase of a ten year program. With this funding in place, the Town will begin the first phase of this multi-year road management and improvement program starting this summer. The program calls for nearly four miles of roadway to be repaired and repaved in 2004. The town is employing two cost-effective techniques to maximize the available funds; micro-paving and hot-in-place (HIP) recycling.

Micro-paving is typically used on roads that are 10 to 15 years old, still have a good riding surface, but are showing signs of deterioration. By micro-paving, the roadway life can be extended an additional 5 to 10 years, thereby reducing the life cycle cost for the treated roads. Prior to micro-paving, roadway cracks are cleaned using a high pressure air jet or a mechanical brush and then filled with a hot bitumen crack sealing liquid. Next, the entire road surface is sealed using two layers of thin pavement referred to as micro-paving. The cost of this technique is about half that of conventional milling and overlaying techniques.

The HIP process is typically used on roads that are in fair condition, but that have too many cracks to successfully micro-pave. With the HIP process, large equipment is used to heat the existing pavement and rake the heated material into a hopper where bitumen additives are introduced. The heated material and additives create a rejuvenated pavement, which is then spread out hot behind the equipment and compacted much like a typical pavement process. The entire road surface is then sealed with two layers of micro-paving.

The proposed paving work will be conducted in two phases. The first phase is scheduled to begin July 23rd and will consist of a hot-in-place (HIP) road recycling process on Summer Street (from Park Street to Federal Street), the entire length of Federal Street, Austin Street (from the Library to Fox Hill Manor), and lower Mendon Street (from Main Street to Lincoln Street). Micro-paving will be conducted the last week of August on these roads, as well as Reilly Avenue, Mark Drive, Nancy Court, and Kimberly Lane. These streets have been selected for the initial phase of the Town’s pavement management program because they offer the greatest cost-benefit to the town resulting in the maximum return on our paving investment. Several other sections of roadway are currently under evaluation for paving including Union Street, Upper Mendon Street, Lower Blackstone Street, Lincoln Street, and Pickering Road. In addition, ALL roads in the Millerville area, as well as Elm Street are scheduled to be paved as part of the on-going sewer project.