Potholes in a Parking Lot or Private Road

Pavement on this clay fails from underneath. Water gets in through a crack, a broken edge or a low spot that holds a puddle, sits on the base course and softens it. Every vehicle that crosses that spot pushes the wet base down and pumps clay from the subgrade up into it. The asphalt above loses its support, flexes, cracks into the pattern people call alligator cracking, and then breaks out as a hole. On the clay under Jefferson, Orange and Hardin counties that cycle runs fast. The ground swells when wet, shrinks when dry, and spends a good part of the year saturated. A lot that took water for days after Harvey or Imelda came out of it with softened base across whole sections, and a lot of the potholes people are chasing today started as water that sat on the surface that week. A gravel road goes through the same cycle without even a surface layer to slow the water down. Ruts hold water, the water softens the base, the ruts get deeper. Private roads running off Highway 69 and Highway 96 into the Hardin County timber, and the long ranch roads south of Interstate 10, usually need their crown restored and their ditches opened as much as they need new rock.

A shovel of cold patch fills the symptom and leaves the soft base in place. The patch has nothing solid under it, so it sinks, the edges ravel, and water gets in around it faster than it did before. After the next hard rain the hole is back, usually a little larger. The same logic applies to an overlay laid over a lot that has soft base under it. A new mat will reflect every failure underneath within a season or two. It looks like a new lot for a year and then the same holes come through in the same places. On a lot with scattered potholes over mostly sound pavement, dig-outs and patching are the right spend. On a lot that is alligator cracked and soft across large areas, an overlay may make sense, but only after the failed base is repaired.

Most holes are base failures and nothing more. A few are a symptom of something under the road that has nothing to do with pavement, and those are the ones to catch before a truck finds them. A hole that keeps getting deeper between rains, that has water standing in it when it has not rained, or that is surrounded by ground settling in a ring is often a leaking water or sewer line washing the base out from below, or a storm drain or culvert under the road that has failed and is taking soil with the water. Inside a plant the same signs can mean a buried process line or a fire water main. Keep traffic off that spot and get the utility or the site's own people to it before anyone digs. Call 811 before any dig-out on a road with buried services under it, which on a commercial lot or a plant road is nearly always. A hole at the edge of a paved road where the shoulder has dropped away is a different hazard. It is a trip hazard for people on foot and a rollover for a cart or a bicycle, and on a plant road those are the vehicles that use it most.

We walk the lot or the road with you first and mark every failure, then sort them: surface damage that can be patched, base failures that need a dig-out, and sections where drainage is the real cause and has to be fixed before anything else will hold. The estimate is priced in that same order so you can see what each fix costs and why. On a dig-out, the failed area is cut back square to sound pavement and dug down to firm ground. Wet base and pumped clay come out. The subgrade is shaped and compacted. New base goes in lifts, each one compacted before the next, and the patch is capped and sealed at the edges so water cannot get back under it. Ditches, low spots and broken shoulders that sent water into the road get corrected at the same time, because a patch next to a puddle is a patch on a timer. Patching, dig-outs, base repair, gravel road regrading and drainage are our own work. When a lot or road needs an overlay or full paving, a paving partner lays the mat while we handle the prep, the base, the traffic plan with your people, the scheduling and the cleanup, and you call one number the whole way through.

Most of this work happens on ground that cannot close. We phase repairs so part of the lot or road stays open and schedule around deliveries, shift changes and busy hours. On a plant site around the Port of Beaumont, the Neches River terminals or the refinery corridor toward Port Arthur, that includes lane closures and foot traffic routes planned with your people before the work starts, and the site orientation and permit-to-work before anything moves. The owner runs the machine, has spent years in and out of plants along the Gulf Coast, and carries a TWIC card, and TRP can also work as a subcontractor under an approved contractor's site program.