Perham’s Tangle Ridge Road Too 

Damaged for Chip-Seal, says Contractor

By: David Deschesne

Fort Fairfield Journal,

May 4, 2011

At their April 28 meeting, the Perham selectman met with Scott Paul from Northern Maine Paving to discuss their options on the voters’ recently passed article to chip-seal portions of Tangle Ridge Road. “We have been starting our research on the Tangle Ridge project,” said selectman, Angela Beckwith. “Jessie has been contacting some paving companies. So far, Northern Maine Paving has met with him and they went out to Tangle ridge and took a look at things.”

“Tangle Ridge has been previously chip-sealed. It’s in pretty bad shape, to be honest. It has spread over the years. It’s been graded to the left and to the right so many times, the road is so wide and so dense that chip-sealing is really not the option I recommend,” Scott Paul told the selectmen during their meeting. “For $15,000 the road is so wide you can’t get a lot of it done. The road is in such bad shape, there’s so many pot holes, there’s so many voids, you wouldn’t get very far because you’re filling in so many holes. So I do not have a estimate for you for chip seal tonight, because for $15,000 I can’t even come out and bring equipment out for that type of job.”

Paul did, however, come forward with another option, one that involves grading the road and spreading calcium chloride. “I met with our Canadian partners today and they wanted me to tell you for six or seven thousand dollars we can get your roads so they’re smooth and the dust is down. We can grade them, we can use the liquid calcium on them and a roller and haul in some material in certain spots so you can roll sixty miles per hour down them with no dust and no bumps. My bosses are an expert on this because they’re from Canada where Irving cuts a lot of woods and they have hundreds and hundreds of miles dirt roads. In our professional opinion, this is the best way to do this.”

The six to seven thousand dollar price would cover grading, rolling and putting down liquid calcium on all of the suggested spots where a total of 2,900 feet of chip seal was proposed by the inhabitants in Perham at the March town meeting. “Chip sealing would be about $70,000,” said Paul. “The way calcium chloride works is we would come in with a grader, we would run a wind row of dirt down the middle of the road; the grader would crown that so you would have your normal existing road again with a crown - right now it’s perfectly flat. We’d then come through with the calcium, then add water to it and then roll it, which would crush the calcium into the water and that would harden just as hard as a basketball court. When you have liquid calcium, that would hold up all summer. Then next year all you’d have to do is maybe some beaded calcium.

Paul said the calcium solution could last most of the year, but maintenance on the road would be a seasonal event. “A lot of it depends on how well the maintenance is done. I’d say every spring run a grader up and down the road, have your highway department put a calcium spreader on the back of your pickup and run that up and down when he knows the rain’s coming and that would fix your problem.”

“Unfortunately, the way the town voted the article is it has to be chip seal, so is there anything at all that can be done,” Beckwith asked Paul.

“Nothing for chip seal. Just to bring the equipment out, that’s an expensive business. If there’s nothing that can be repealed or redone, there’s nothing I can do for you,” he answered.

“This liquid calcium and rollers would have been our alternative choice to afford doing this project but because the article was voted to chip seal, we can’t,” said Beckwith.

There are two more contractors still to submit estimates on the Tangle Ridge project.