I lived on Chestnut St. in Ramsey NJ for almost 50 years. I guess during that time period we saw the street resurfaced 3 or 4 times. The condition of the road in 2015 was horrendous. During the previous year or two, Ramsey patched the street around a dozen times I would guess. That was all in my opinion due to the poor quality of the previous resurfacing job. When these companies resurface a normal suburban street, they remove the old asphalt in one phase, and they put new asphalt down in 2 phases, one for each side of the road. On the previous job, I think they laid down asphalt on one day and then they waited till the next day to put the other half down. The result was a split right down the middle of Chestnut Street that started within months of paying for the road to be resurfaced. Cold asphalt does not bond well with hot asphalt apparently and the last company did not heat that seam well enough to bind both sides during the previous job. The other half of that problem is that the town let them get away with it.
I went to the Municipal building several times to complain about the quality of the road and they already knew it was bad but they told me it would be at least another 3 years before it would be done due to budget restraints. Luckily, maybe in part to my repeated trips to the Municipal Building, and maybe due to just good luck, or perhaps they re-evaluated and moved Chestnut Street up on the list… they did a fantastic job resurfacing Chestnut Street in 2015, just before we sold our house. The crew in these pics (and I’ll put up a video later) was excellent. They laid down the asphalt on both sides of the street one right after the other and the new road surface we landed up with on Chestnut St. was textbook excellent quality. Very impressive work.
So there are 2 take-aways from this experience. First, town employees have to watch vendors like a hawk to make sure they do the job correctly that the taxpayers paid for. Second, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
Click any of the thumbnail images below to bring up the slideshow. If you are watching the slideshow, in the upper right corner of the screen, there will be some controls in RED. Click the RED SQUARE to go FULLSCREEN. That looks the best. You can also click the RED X to EXIT. Hoover your mouse over an image to stop the automatic slideshow. Cheers !!
