Progress

The city road crew came through yesterday and today, yesterday scraping down the asphalt on our main connector street, today laying down a new layer. The speed at which this is accomplished is impressive.

Scraper trucks traveling slightly faster than a street sweeper pared down the rough patches with one pass down each southbound lane (the road is two lanes in each direction with a landscaped median. Walking work crews followed behind sweeping up chunks too large for the truck to ingest. That was yesterday and they easily went from one end of the road to the other.

Today, the paving trucks rumbled down the inner lane trailing, and leveling, a three or four inch layer of fresh asphalt. They were followed by a train of steam rollers smoothing and compressing the new surface. At the rate they're going they will have one lane complete by the end of the day. Monday for the second lane and then it's just a matter of repainting the stripes.

I remember, when I was a kid the asphalt was dumped one truck load at a time, and guys with shovels and industrial rakes would spread it out before the rollers came and progress was measured in yards per day, not miles.