Ledbetter completes first month as county road engineer

Better Roads for Titus County recently caught up with Roger Ledbetter to see how his first month as Titus County Road Engineer has gone.

His primary focus is on getting his people trained and the equipment working, so that they can undertake two main types of road work, Road Reconstruction and Seal Coating.

Road Reconstruction is going to be needed on the many miles of roads where the base is in poor condition. This involves grinding up the road surface and into the base, adding more material and binders such as lime or fly ash, compacting the base and then laying down a new surface.

The County does have an old Bomag grinder which does sort of work but it needs some replacement parts to get it into good working order. As it was made in Germany and is an obsolete model, parts are hard to find and expensive.

The main equipment need is a 'padfoot' roller to compact the base (see photo). As the weight of the equipment is spread over the small surface area of the pads, the compaction force is several times higher than with the smooth rollers that the County has been using.

The Road Engineer is also working on improving the method of breaking down old asphalt into smaller pieces so that when they use it to resurface roads they get a smoother surface. Also old asphalt is no longer being given away to residents, as they intend to use every bit of it to repair and rebuild roads.

The county used to seal coat roads but stopped doing so about a dozen years ago. The two key pieces of equipment needed for this are a hot oil spreading truck and a chip spreader. The old oil spreader looks to be beyond repair and needs to be replaced but the chip spreader can probably be got into working order.

At the April 24 Commissioners meeting  Ledbetter made his first report and suggested that the County should spend some of the extra $1 million that they budgeted for roads this year to buy a 'padfoot' compactor and a hot oil spreader.

All the equipment has now been inventoried and much of it relocated to the main barn off Industrial. The mechanics are very busy working through it and making repairs. A list of what to keep and excess that can be sold off (or scrapped) is starting to take shape.

All in all Mr. Ledbetter is off to a good start and is steadily getting his hands around what he has inherited