Allan Appel Photo
Jacob Oakes at work milling around catch basins and curbs.
Karina Courtmanche rushed outside Monday morning — to make sure the machines making noise outside didn’t inadvertently crush the wild roses growing along the curb outside her Greenhill Terrace home.
Courtmanche, who lives on Greenhill Terrace, had heard the grinding, crunching sound of the huge mechanical brontosaurus of a milling machine, the warning horns of the quickly turning little Bobcats, and the dump trucks churning up the old asphalt along Fairfield Street
Lawlor with Courtmanche and the roadside roses.
Welcome to the first day of the milling-and-paving season in New Haven, which this year kicked off with the milling of Fairfield Street in upper Westville, the blocks from Seneca Road to East Ramsdell Street.
Longtime Department of Public Works staffer Dave Lawlor was out supervising Jacob Oakes in the little Bobcat and Harlan Bedell and other members of the crew from the Bloomfield-based Garrity Asphalt Reclaiming, the company with which the city subcontracts for the milling work.
“I’d give them hell if they hit anything,” Ktrina said, “but they took good care. They were very respectful of everything.”
This year the milling and paving is being done in three waves, reported Lawlor, after he heard that he and the Garrity crew had passed the flower-care test.
In all 44 blocks will be worked on this season, which is more than last year’s. Click here for the list of streets slated for repaving this season.
The first wave of milling is this week in June, then two and a half weeks in July and two and a half weeks in September. Which streets are worked on and in which order is decided on by a group called the Resource Allocation Committee, comprised of city staffers and alders, with assignments for work made based on priorities of need.
The approach is the same as last year’s, Lawlor said, with perhaps the only new factor being the exceptional rainfall and wetness of the spring thus far.
Harlan Bedell adjusts height of the track on the miller so it doesn’t up end manhole covers.
Milling involes churning the asphalt down usually to two inches.
That’s what was happening all along Fairfield Street, as a few neighbors in addition to Portmanche watched. The large mill machine led the way. It crunched up the asphalt and simultaneously scooped up the shards and chunks onto a conveyor belt. When the machine finally stopped at the bottom of the hill, at Westerleigh, it dumped the asphalt into waiting dump trucks.
When everything is chugging along, the mill machine can can fill up a dump truck with crushed asphalt every three minutes, said crew member Jacob Oakes.
The mill machine costs about $500,000, estimated Harlan Bedell, who was in charge of its operation. That’s why the city subcontracts and does not own such equipment.
After the milling machine makes its pass, sweepers come along and clean up. The Bobcats, which can turn in a circular motion, which the large miller is unable to do, attend to the milling around the catch basins and other street infrastructure.
Lawlor said the crew was working fine, milling down to the two inches, and laying open grooves.
Those grooves will be the first target of the paving company. Weather permitting, they’ll be out in the coming days to do the paving, which essentially is to replace the two inches with new asphalt.
That job goes to Tilcon Connecticut, as it has been in previous years.
In a first pass, Tilcon’s tanker truck drop into the grooves what Bedell described as a spray of hot, black, rubber glue.
It’s more formally called a “tack,” said Lawlor. It will enable the asphalt to adhere strongly.
You don’t want to get the “tack” on you, Lawlor advised.
The tack was nowhere in sight, as the paving is days way. It can rain on the milled and grooved street and not cause a problem, and even the milling can take place in drizzles and rain. However, the asphalt crews need good weather, and that’s what Lawlor was hoping for.
“We’ve got to be eight or nine streets ahead of the paving,” he said.
When the crew finishes Fairfield Street, next on the list for the day’s work was to mill Chapel between Ella Grasso Boulevard and Yale Avenue. And after that Day Street between George and Chapel.
Lawlor said it’s likely they’ll be able to finish only the Chapel Street segment as moving the huge milling machine into position — and then staging it for the next day’s work — is always a complicating factor.
There's nothing quite as satisfying as a newly paved street with freshly painted yellow lines. Makes me feel like we have a functioning city government.