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That we’ve been paying good money for substandard asphalt to fill potholes is bad enough. That we’ve been doing it in spite of warnings from all over Ontario that there’s a plague of bad asphalt is much worse.
City auditor Ken Hughes reported on this situation Thursday, with findings that Kanata South Coun. Allan Hubley, who chairs city council’s audit committee, called “revolting.” He and other councillors are right ticked: It’s re-election time soon and who isn’t glad to be able to blame bureaucrats for pitted roads and to promise to knock some heads. But their anger is not misplaced. Potholes tend to be at the edges of roads where cyclists ride and where the murky puddles accumulate that passing drivers splash pedestrians with. It’s not just a drivers’ problem.
Kanata South Coun. Allan Hubley.
In his recent speech on next year’s budget, Mayor Jim Watson made a point of the 253,000 potholes the city has filled this year.
“The changing weather patterns have created major challenges in maintaining our roads, pathways and community infrastructure,” Watson said in that speech. “The abundance of rain and spring flooding, the extraordinary amount of snow, and the number of freeze-thaw cycles has significantly impacted the quality of our roadways, shoulders, sidewalks and road beds.”
Yes. And we’ve been patching roads with subpar asphalt.
Related
Ottawa’s audit follows a much deeper look into provincial roads that Ontario’s auditor general, Bonnie Lysyk, released a year ago. The Ministry of Transportation had contracted out practically every aspect of road construction and maintenance in stages after 1996, and in the intervening 20 years its staff had shrivelled so badly, and got so far removed from work on the ground, that contractors were getting away with huge ripoffs.
In a set of just five roads Lysyk looked at, we paid $143 million for the initial work, then another $23 million for repairs a couple of years later. A proper new road should last 15 years without major maintenance.
Lysyk explained the incentive everybody had to cheap out. Roads are paved with gravel and sand held together with “asphalt cement,” which is the thick sticky black liquid left after petroleum refineries have extracted every other usable molecule from crude oil.
Paving crews working on Albert Street.
Historically, refineries were glad to be rid of it. But they’ve gotten better at refining, leaving less gluey residue to dispose of, and it’s not as if North America’s total acreage of pavement has been shrinking.
Lysyk pegged the price of asphalt cement at $540 a tonne. According to the Ontario Asphalt Pavement Council, the industry association, it rose from under $300 a tonne in 2001 to more than $850 a tonne in 2014 before falling back a bit to $600 a tonne this year. It is not cheap anymore.
So, said Lysyk, asphalt suppliers started cutting their asphalt cement with used motor oil (some have even experimented with vegetable oils). You can do a bit of this without meaningfully affecting quality but there is a point where using less-gluey filler liquid makes a difference.
“In colder climates like Ontario’s in winter, excessive amounts of recycled engine oil greatly reduces the life of a highway because it becomes hard and brittle in colder winter temperatures,” the provincial auditor explained in her report.
In Ottawa, the two samples of asphalt Hughes had tested were both short in asphalt cement — too much cheap filler, not enough expensive glue. Ten per cent short of the minimum specification in one sample, 17 per cent short in the other.
Both had other failings, too. One was too squishy; the other had almost double the volume of air pockets the specification allowed, making it prone to cracking and crumbling. It’s only two samples but, as the audit report says, a 100 per cent failure rate is concerning.
Hughes didn’t reveal who supplied the faulty asphalt but the city has only Karson, Tomlinson and Coco Paving on its go-to list. As West Carleton-March Coun. Eli El-Chantiry said Thursday, asphalt’s not like shawarma: There isn’t a different shop every other block if you don’t like the last place you got some.
Ottawa boasts an inordinate number of shawarma restaurants.
But there is the possibility of saying, “This stuff isn’t up to scratch and we aren’t paying you for it.” Or, as Watson has suggested the city might, opening a city asphalt plant and making it ourselves. (The general manager of public works, Kevin Wylie, said another option is to loosen the specifications for pothole asphalt.)
Anybody who deals with asphalt professionally ought to have understood the motive to replace asphalt cement with old 10W-30. Windsor has been onto this for years — not sure what the cause was, but sure that something was wrong with its pavement. So has Sudbury. The provincial Transportation Ministry knew it had a problem with substandard asphalt as early as 2004. People in the business were talking about it. But nothing spurred Ottawa to check out its pothole-filler asphalt until Hughes’ auditors showed up.
This audit is only of about $845,000 worth of asphalt, a small percentage of the total we buy each year. Wholesale repavings account for vastly more, and Hughes’ report says the separate department that oversees those has a testing program. Well, so does the provincial Transportation Ministry. Lysyk found the ministry was slack about that testing to the point of letting contractors swap samples, substituting good asphalt for bad when they might have been caught.
Maybe that’d be a worthwhile area for one of Hughes’ future efforts.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
City auditor Ken Hughes reported on this situation Thursday, with findings that Kanata South Coun. Allan Hubley, who chairs city council’s audit committee, called “revolting.” He and other councillors are right ticked: It’s re-election time soon and who isn’t glad to be able to blame bureaucrats for pitted roads and to promise to knock some heads. But their anger is not misplaced. Potholes tend to be at the edges of roads where cyclists ride and where the murky puddles accumulate that passing drivers splash pedestrians with. It’s not just a drivers’ problem.
Kanata South Coun. Allan Hubley.
In his recent speech on next year’s budget, Mayor Jim Watson made a point of the 253,000 potholes the city has filled this year.
“The changing weather patterns have created major challenges in maintaining our roads, pathways and community infrastructure,” Watson said in that speech. “The abundance of rain and spring flooding, the extraordinary amount of snow, and the number of freeze-thaw cycles has significantly impacted the quality of our roadways, shoulders, sidewalks and road beds.”
Yes. And we’ve been patching roads with subpar asphalt.
Related
Ottawa’s audit follows a much deeper look into provincial roads that Ontario’s auditor general, Bonnie Lysyk, released a year ago. The Ministry of Transportation had contracted out practically every aspect of road construction and maintenance in stages after 1996, and in the intervening 20 years its staff had shrivelled so badly, and got so far removed from work on the ground, that contractors were getting away with huge ripoffs.
In a set of just five roads Lysyk looked at, we paid $143 million for the initial work, then another $23 million for repairs a couple of years later. A proper new road should last 15 years without major maintenance.
Lysyk explained the incentive everybody had to cheap out. Roads are paved with gravel and sand held together with “asphalt cement,” which is the thick sticky black liquid left after petroleum refineries have extracted every other usable molecule from crude oil.
Paving crews working on Albert Street.
Historically, refineries were glad to be rid of it. But they’ve gotten better at refining, leaving less gluey residue to dispose of, and it’s not as if North America’s total acreage of pavement has been shrinking.
Lysyk pegged the price of asphalt cement at $540 a tonne. According to the Ontario Asphalt Pavement Council, the industry association, it rose from under $300 a tonne in 2001 to more than $850 a tonne in 2014 before falling back a bit to $600 a tonne this year. It is not cheap anymore.
So, said Lysyk, asphalt suppliers started cutting their asphalt cement with used motor oil (some have even experimented with vegetable oils). You can do a bit of this without meaningfully affecting quality but there is a point where using less-gluey filler liquid makes a difference.
“In colder climates like Ontario’s in winter, excessive amounts of recycled engine oil greatly reduces the life of a highway because it becomes hard and brittle in colder winter temperatures,” the provincial auditor explained in her report.
In Ottawa, the two samples of asphalt Hughes had tested were both short in asphalt cement — too much cheap filler, not enough expensive glue. Ten per cent short of the minimum specification in one sample, 17 per cent short in the other.
Both had other failings, too. One was too squishy; the other had almost double the volume of air pockets the specification allowed, making it prone to cracking and crumbling. It’s only two samples but, as the audit report says, a 100 per cent failure rate is concerning.
Hughes didn’t reveal who supplied the faulty asphalt but the city has only Karson, Tomlinson and Coco Paving on its go-to list. As West Carleton-March Coun. Eli El-Chantiry said Thursday, asphalt’s not like shawarma: There isn’t a different shop every other block if you don’t like the last place you got some.
Ottawa boasts an inordinate number of shawarma restaurants.
But there is the possibility of saying, “This stuff isn’t up to scratch and we aren’t paying you for it.” Or, as Watson has suggested the city might, opening a city asphalt plant and making it ourselves. (The general manager of public works, Kevin Wylie, said another option is to loosen the specifications for pothole asphalt.)
Anybody who deals with asphalt professionally ought to have understood the motive to replace asphalt cement with old 10W-30. Windsor has been onto this for years — not sure what the cause was, but sure that something was wrong with its pavement. So has Sudbury. The provincial Transportation Ministry knew it had a problem with substandard asphalt as early as 2004. People in the business were talking about it. But nothing spurred Ottawa to check out its pothole-filler asphalt until Hughes’ auditors showed up.
This audit is only of about $845,000 worth of asphalt, a small percentage of the total we buy each year. Wholesale repavings account for vastly more, and Hughes’ report says the separate department that oversees those has a testing program. Well, so does the provincial Transportation Ministry. Lysyk found the ministry was slack about that testing to the point of letting contractors swap samples, substituting good asphalt for bad when they might have been caught.
Maybe that’d be a worthwhile area for one of Hughes’ future efforts.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
