Stuck in a Road Rut?

If road repair falls in your lap, here are some tips.

The Crown. Getting the crown or center of the road higher than the sides is critical. The center of the roadbed should be about 3 inches higher than the shoulder.

Ditches. Without drainage ditches of the proper depth, you basically have a streambed with no way for rainwater to escape, except by traveling down the tire tracks. Make them at least 1 foot lower than the surface of the road.

Adding riprap, culverts and turnouts will help slow the water runoff and divert it from the roadbed. A turnout is simply a section of the ditch that has been graded in an angle away from the roadbed to divert water.

"One of the best ways to prevent erosion on the sides of the road is to get a good stand of grass growing on the road banks," says Perry Oakes of the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Alabama.

Equipment. Ditching, grading and filling potholes can be accomplished by a tractor with a front-end loader and a scrape or box blade on the 3-point hitch. The front-end loader can be used to clean out the ditches and dump gravel. A scrape turned at a slight inward angle or a box blade works well. They can pull gravel from the road edges to the center and fill potholes. In some cases, a dozer may be required to create the proper depth on drainage ditches.

Surfacing Materials. Oakes recommends using crushed stone for access-road surfacing. No. 57 crushed stone, which averages from ½ to ¾ inch in diameter, sets up well.

Geotextile fabric rolled onto the road before spreading gravel prevents the gravel from being worked down through the soil. "The fabric costs a lot up front (around $2 per linear foot), but down the road it saves a lot of time and expense in road repair," says Oakes.

Check out this site for other helpful tips from the USDA Forest Service