Damascus Township, PA
Damascus Township, PA, population roughly 3,700, is a two-hour drive from the New York City area. With 29 miles of shoreline along the Delaware River, it’s the perfect place to live: a rural setting with local businesses, strong community, and some of the best roads in Wayne County.
Until recently, Damascus Township had a double problem: failing roads and a small budget. In fact, they had almost 3 miles of roads with failing road base. Steve Adams, Township Supervisor, had the solution, a process called Full Depth Reclamation, or FDR for short. Full Depth Reclamation uses a road reclaimer to pulverize the asphalt, chip seal, or gravel road surface, simultaneously blending it into the road base. The result is a stabilized road base comparable to full road reconstruction.
A reclamation contractor was willing to do the job, but the price tag of $320-350,000, just for the reclamation, was the total amount Damascus Township had budgeted for the entire project start to finish. If they paid for the full depth reclamation, they wouldn’t have money left over for paving.
Steve balked at the idea of another temporary repair. This particular road had been patched and re-patched. Putting a new road over bad road base would waste tax payer dollars, and Steve wasn’t about to do that. As Steve says, “None of this is rocket science; it’s all common sense.” The only alternative was FDR.
About this time, Steve attended the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors (PSATS) Annual Conference where he discovered the perfect solution: a company called Asphalt Zipper! Asphalt Zippers are portable asphalt milling, asphalt grinding, and road reclaimer attachments. They connect to your loader or backhoe and are transported behind a pickup truck on their own trailer.
What really appealed to Steve was Asphalt Zipper’s promise: Quicker, Easier, Longer Lasting Road Repairs for Less than Half the Cost. As Steve says about road repairs, “The whole premise is to get the best value for the buck.” He started doing some calculating. He could purchase his own road reclaimer in the form of an Asphalt Zipper, do the FDR project in house, and still have money to chip seal afterwards. He didn’t stop there though; he applied for state and local low volume road grants to help fund the road project and future projects.
Besides the time and cost savings, possibly the best benefit of owning an Asphalt Zipper is the ability to customize your full depth reclamation project to meet the needs of your specific area. Now Steve “Zips” a road and re-profiles it. Then he adds asphalt millings and mixes them in with the Zipper. Finally, he compacts and adds an Ultrabond sealant. At this point the road is in good shape for driving, but they don’t pave or chip seal immediately. Because Damascus Township has natural springs and water drainage issues, they let the road winter. In the spring, it’s easy troubleshoot and quickly fix additional water issues and then pave or chip seal.
Damascus Township doesn’t stop with paved roads. They also use their Zipper to fix the road base on dirt roads. As Steve has found out, one of the beauties of the Asphalt Zipper is that it is a multi-purpose machine, used for a variety of applications.
When you use an Asphalt Zipper, the cost and time savings really add up. Steve says, “We’re saving approximately 70% compared to contracting out. What use to take months and cost around $450,000, we can now do ourselves in about a week, on our own time schedule, for about $130,000.”