After
Posted on 07/30/2005 11:06:12 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
ATLANTA - Thomas Settles grew up on a dirt road in Edgefield, S.C., a road so crummy it washed out completely after a heavy rain and he sometimes couldn't get to school. Summers were spent choking at the road's dust.
Now 53, Settles owns a paving company in Atlanta and is on a mission to save poor Southerners from the indignities he grew up with. He's out to make dirt roads as good as paved ones.
"Look at this," he says, holding up a plastic jug of molasses-looking brown stuff. "This is all it takes."
The brown stuff is an enzyme called PZ-22X that can toughen dirt roads and help them stand up better to rain. He says it will be a blessing for rural communities that can't afford to pave all their roads.
Settles didn't invent the enzyme, but he bought the rights to it, christened it a better sounding "Pave-Zyme" and is getting permission across the Southeast to test it on dirt roads.
Mixed with water and sprayed on dirt, the Pave-Zyme acts as a sealing agent, making the dirt more impermeable to water.
"It seals, it acts as a dust suppressor and it compresses," says Settles, whose claims about the enzyme would seem ridiculous if he didn't appear to believe them. He very genuinely says Pave-Zyme can improve health (by reducing dust in the air around dirt roads), narrow the education achievement gap between rich and poor (because kids living off dirt roads wouldn't have trouble getting to school) and otherwise revolutionize life in rural America.
And he's spreading the dream.
Atlanta — which still has some dirt and gravel roads — will test Pave-Zyme on three roads starting in August. The enzyme recently was put down on a dirt road in Aberdeen, Miss. and is also being tested in Macon County, Ala.
Settles says Pave-Zyme can harden a dirt road for $60,000 to $100,000 a mile — versus $180,000 and up to put down a mile of asphalt.
He isn't charging for the tests, where Pave-Zyme is mixed with water and sprayed on dirt or used under asphalt to make regular roads hold up longer. But Settles thinks that once local officials see how well it works, they'll come back to buy.
"It was a win-win," said Atlanta City Councilman Ceasar Mitchell, who sponsored the idea of allowing Settles' company to try Pave-Zyme for free in Atlanta. Included in the city's test is a dirt road where a girl died three years ago when her bike hit a pothole. The accident made local headlines, but the city still hasn't found money to pave that road.
"It's just unsightly," said Mitchell, adding that dirt roads often attract illegal garbage dumping.
In other communities, dirt roads can be downright dangerous. In Brantley County in southeast Georgia, which has 700 miles of dirt roads, emergency workers have reported getting stuck on their way to calls.
"It's always a challenge. In the winter when it's wet, you can get stuck. In the summer, it's all dust and sand, and you can get stuck in that. It happens quite frequently," said Tim Crews, director of the county's Emergency Medical Service. "If we could get a dirt road that acted like a paved road, that would be a great help to us."
Settles says Pave-Zyme makes a road good for five to seven years, shorter than asphalt paving but still an improvement from plain dirt, although road officials were skeptical.
Experts warn the Pave-Zyme idea probably isn't a low-cost cure-all. Other hardeners have been tried before, and products such as calcium chloride are already regularly added to dirt roads to help them last and reduce dust.
Nothing, so far, has completely solved the problem, said Dennis Rice, who puts together a quarterly newsletter on road technology for the Georgia Department of Transportation.
"If you want a road to be like it's paved, you've got to pave it," Rice said. Dirt road improvements are especially troublesome in the South, where heavy rains and hot summers work against road hardeners, he said.
"You really have to have something you can hold together real tight," such as gravel used in pavement, he said. "Dirt's not made to hold together like that. It gets brittle, and it can crack."
But Rice and other transportation officials aren't completely dismissing Pave-Zyme. The Georgia DOT is monitoring the Atlanta test and may consider endorsing it for local use if Pave-Zyme performs well. (The department doesn't directly maintain any dirt roads; all the ones in Georgia are maintained by counties and cities.)
Georgene Geary, a materials and research engineer for the Georgia DOT, said she's curious to see whether Pave-Zyme does the job.
"We've had other products come through here and they weren't successful. They just didn't hold up," she said.
Settles is convinced he's about to change some minds.
"In some communities, they just can't afford to pave all their roads," he said. "This is something that will consistently make the roads better at a price they can afford."
It's wait-and-see for officials.
"There's a lot of snake oil out there that doesn't work, but the only way to know for sure is to put it down and try it out," Rice said.
After
Funny an article like this should be posted at the very time I am searching in another screen for specifications on road paving.
Are there any FReeper experts on road paving?
In our city they just paved two near asphalt roads and they are bumpy as heck. I want to know why.
If you sight down the center paint striping, you can actually see the very uneven surface - if you ever road dirt bikes, they look like whoop-d-doos or moguls in skiing. The surface is wavery and bumpy on new black top.
Any help will be appreciated.
Funny an article like this should be posted at the very time I am searching in another screen for specifications on road paving.
Are there any FReeper experts on road paving?
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There are no coincidences, yaknow.. at least that's what some say. ;-)
The newly paved surface may have had poor subsurface preparation, ie;; a bad job of levelling,, or the material used in the paving surface was not rolled quick enough after being laid down.
Them's my best guestimate,, I have paved a bit and poured a bit but not in quite a few years.
You may want to contact the local roads dept and comment to them on the work done.
DirtGlue? Thanks.
a flexible, soil bonding polymer solution.
Thanks, I did contact them. They said they were aware of the problem but have not just done the same exact thing on a second bit of road in our town.
We are in a boom here and they are getting ready to pave the whole town nearly. They do not know what they are doing.
I've been exposed to road paving when I was involved with contracting out for road surfacing in a small town I lived in.
What I am looking for is a resource that says just what the steps should be, general specifications if they exist.
When they were working on the road I could see they had not touched it with a grader of if they had the grader operator did not know how to run the machine. They paved over a rough uneven base surface.
But it is worse than that as I would think the black top would take up for some of the bumps (unevenness) but it did not. I have a meeting with them in a few days and want to get a bit more information.
Do you have a resource for basic paving steps and specs?
Thanks for the reply and input.
Watersorb and Coolties. Thanks.
I don;t see a Road Paving for Dummies book out .. yet anyway. ;-)
But this link may help a bit or have some add'l links that may provide more info. About one third of the way down the page, There is a box with some links that have a history of asphalt and other such info available.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blasphalt.htm
also, search results link for road paving from Yahooey is below as well.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=road+paving&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t-174&fl=0&x=wrt.
Thanks! :)
I'm all for innovation, but grading a road, laying 3 inches of gravel, and then putting down 6 inches of asphalt only costs $1.25 per square foot.
For a 12 foot wide rural road or light airport runway, that's about $80,000 per mile...for asphalt.
That guy wants to charge $100,000 to give you a dirt road that will need his product reapplied in a few years?!
Come on...
Hmmmmmmmm....
Anybody who has ever cleaned a litter box knows that cat pee works much the same way.
Read later bump. This stuff has a lot of potential for the gardening industry.
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