CHARLESTON, W.Va. — With the summer fast approaching and the recent Blue Ribbon Commission report painting a harsh picture of WV highways, Transportation Secretary Paul Mattox talked about plans for summer paving work.
Mattox said one of the big projects this summer was to maintain the roads and find ways to make them last longer.
“This summer we’re really emphasizing our pavement preservation program,” Mattox said. “We’re trying to work with our engineers to figure out how to extend the life of our existing pavements and do a lot of that type of work.”
He said that all sorts of work goes into the effort to preserve pavement.
“We’re going to be doing fog seals, more surface treatments, double surface treatments with fog seals,” he explained. “In place recycling is a new type of technology that we’re looking at here in West Virginia that’s been used successfully in other states.”
He said that so far, the projects that have been done using the new recycled asphalt technology have held up well.
“We actually have completed a couple over in Clay County on state Route 4,” Mattox said. “We’re currently monitoring those to see how they hold up. So far we’ve seen good results.
The Blue Ribbon Commission recently estimated that over one-third of West Virginia’s highway system is in poor condition and that the state of roads costs state residents over $300 a year in car repairs.