It’s that time of year. Snow, sun, melt, freeze again. And there, beneath the cold packed precipitation, the road hazard of the spring — potholes. Some drivers boldly declare that they preferred the ice.
It’s a hard time of year for the streets and roads team, City Manager Pete Williams said, weather springing from wet to warm wears and tears the gravel roads.
“One of the biggest problems we have is the freeze, and then it unthaws during the day, then it freezes again,” he said.
Freezing moisture causes cracks, creating potholes. And the graders, the equipment used to fix them, have problems making lasting fixes when the ground is still frozen.
“A lot of times, they can't dig, dig, dig deep enough to get rid of the potholes.” Williams said. “ The other day, they reported to me that they're trying to smooth the road out, and they actually damaged the blade, they broke the teeth off the blade.”
And they can’t re-use gravel that gets sprayed to the side of the road by speeding cars.
“The problem is usually the gravel on the side of the road doesn't have the fines or the sand in it. It's just, they're just like marbles,” he said.
The city is in charge of the gravel roads, which are most of them. The state takes care of the highways, which are made of asphalt. Williams said asphalt would solve a lot of problems, but like most things in Bethel, it’s expensive.
“Right now, the [Department of Transportation has] just told us that we can't maintain them. And we differ on that. I think we could if we tried,” he said. “But it comes back to cost.”
Williams said, for example, just to pave a small section of pavement on Ridge Crest Road in front of the high school cost $5.4 million dollars.
“If you look at the Scandinavian countries, they have the same problem. We got permafrost, blah, blah, blah. The difference is that they're willing to put in the money that's needed to build a road that will endure in these conditions. We don’t have that. It just doesn't happen in Alaska,” he said.
So in lieu of paved roads, the city is interested in affordable solutions that mitigate dust and potholes on gravel in the warmer months. On Tuesday, the city leaders decided to try one called EK35, a new road binding material that’s gaining popularity across Alaska. Bethel City Council approved spending $100,000 to try it out.
“We're going to give it a test run this spring, it'll come up on the first barge.” Williams said.
EK35 would be replacing calcium chloride, which has to be re-applied to the roads continuously because it washes away with the rain. EK35 on the other hand, reactivates itself and doesn’t wash away, and has the potential to stabilize the gravel roads for up to a year after four applications.
“Everybody knows how nice and hard the roads get when we put calcium chloride on them. And then it rains and they turn into slop. And this product doesn't do that apparently. It stays nice and stiff,” said city council member Mark Springer.
The city is ordering enough of the material to do the full treatment on a one-mile section of Ptarmigan Street, to test how well the product works.
“I think we have about a mile's worth of product here that we're getting and my understanding is that it may go in a couple of sections of road around town,” Springer said.
Since it’s new, the city isn’t entirely sure how it’s going to go. But they have already seen a demonstration of EK35 used in Northwest Canada that has similar conditions to Bethel.
“My understanding from discussions both with the manager and with public works directly is that this product has been vetted pretty thoroughly by them. There's nothing similar on the market. There's an Alaskan distributor for it,” Springer said.
Unlike with calcium chloride, the roads team can go back and grade the potholes and get benefits from it again. It’s also a liquid, so it’s less likely to go airborne through the dust and cause health problems.
“One difference is the calcium chloride is a powder. So it's a dry substance. It dries a lot of materials out. It can dry rubber out, it can dry leather out. That's the whole idea is that you put it on the roads and it dries them out,” Williams said.
This damages service equipment and the bottom of cars, and can get kicked up in dust, and cause eye and skin irritation, burns, and upper respiratory tract infections.
“It's so, so corrosive that it actually eats the bed of the truck out after time.” Williams said.
EK-35 is not a skin irritant, and inhalation is highly unlikely.
The city wrote that while the purchase and use of EK-35 is expensive, they see the potential for long term savings. Polar Supply is the sole distributor of EK-35 for purchases in Alaska, and Midwest manufactures it, and determines the best program for Bethel’s specific road conditions. Even though a lot is still unknown, the city is hopeful that the new product could improve road conditions and road team frustrations.
“I don't have any drawbacks,” Williams said. “And you know, I don't believe anything until I see it. So we'll bring the first load up here to cover approximately a mile of it, we'll pick a spot, and we'll try it out. And that'll really give us the best idea of how this works.”
For now, the best way to avoid potholes, dust, road rage inducing conditions, and headaches for the maintenance teams: slow down. Especially if you see fresh gravel, 15-20 miles per hour will do it.
“When it gets really dusty here, if you're driving down the street at 15 miles an hour and you look in your rear view mirror, there's a distinct difference on the dust you're kicking up. Versus going down the road at 50 miles an hour, or 40 or 30, or whatever. So it's really remarkable. What a difference it makes,” said Williams.
In the meantime, the roads team will keep grading, and you can find the first EK-35 treated roads in Bethel this spring.
