Cold-asphalt RAP mix used in PennDOT’s pilot to pave rural roads fails

Screen shot of Egypt Road from WNEP video.

One year ago, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) initiated a pilot program, paving rural roads using a cold recycled asphalt mix, but the process failed and needs to be done again at a cost to taxpayers of $400,000, WNEP reports.

Egypt Road near Honesdale has patches of road that have cracked and crumbled away. PennDOT officials who touted the pilot program a year ago now confirm that the cold asphalt mixture they used did not work the way they planned.

“We thought, ‘great!’ All of a sudden, we heard someone changed the formula, and it’s not working, and everything stopped. This road has been like this and is just one big pothole,” Gerard Carden, a resident having to deal with the aftermath told the news agency. “Now there’s nothing. The road is as bad as it was before, if not worse.”

“A few days into that [the project], we started noticing oil coming up in the road,” said PennDOT official James May, according to the news agency. “The inspector was not pleased with what was happening out there. We decided to stop that. When it doesn’t go the way you hope, then that’s disappointing. We were able to catch it early enough in the process.”

PennDOT says recycled asphalt will still be able to be used, but with a different mixture and mostly just on the shoulders of the road.