City reviews quality of Iqaluit road paving

ODILE NELSON

Iqaluit’s director of engineering has commissioned a review of the city’s road paving after raising concerns that asphalt laid since 2001 may not be up to snuff.

Brad Sokach, who took over the city’s engineering division on May 20, said he decided to commission the $6,400 report after suspending paving last month when the asphalt “didn’t look right” to his relatively untrained eye.

The city’s road paving this year began in early August, Sokach said, and within three days he noticed a problem with the material.

When he consulted others and they responded that “it looked better than last year’s,” Sokach decided to hire an Ottawa consulting firm to review the quality of the asphalt.

“I wanted to be sure that for the price we’re paying, everything was right,” he said. “It was my decision to do that because we’re looking at a four-year program starting in 2004 and that’s for quite a bit of money – millions of dollars. I wanted to make sure council understands the quality of asphalt we’ve gotten in the past three years.”

Asphalt is made up of a mix of materials – gravel, sand, screenings (fine material) and asphalt, or the binder that holds the mix together, Sokach said. It must have the right proportion of these ingredients, otherwise it will wear easily,

“What’s happening is we have too much of the tar material in the mix right now and not enough sand,” Sokach said.

The asphalt in question is part of the city’s 2002 paving program – a contract awarded to Baffin Building Systems for $1.6 million. Base layers were laid last year along Ring Road, Federal Road and Airport Road. BBS was putting a top layer on these roads in August when Sokach suspended the work.

If the report finds the 2002 program’s asphalt mix is inferior, it will be up to BBS, as the contractor, to correct the problem, Sokach said.

But he believes that the cost to this year’s paving program will be minimal, since the problem was caught early.

Sokach also applauded BBS’s response to the situation, saying the company is working hard to rectify problems.

The city will begin its 2003 paving program on Sept. 10, between the Frobisher Inn bridge and the hospital, as well as near the Road to Nowhere. But this asphalt will have a new mix and should not be affected, Sokach said.

Sokach expects the Ottawa firm to present its report in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, three new mixes of asphalt are being tested. The 2002 paving program should resume once the right mix is found.