A half-mile snippet of Albro Road, a sleepy byway in Sherburne, New York, 36 miles south of Utica, had severe cracks in its pavement. They made for a teeth-chattering ride.
“I don’t think you’d want to have an open coffee cup in your hand on that road,” said Winton, Sherburne’s highway superintendent.
It was his job to fix it.
Winton, a Sherburne native who went to school across the road from the town garage, drove his F350 pickup through the area’s rolling hills as he described Albro Road. Jutting up against the Chenango/Madison County line, it is home to a church and a handful of farms and houses at the northern edge of Sherburne, an agricultural town of 4,000 people.
Sheets of concrete underneath the road had broken apart at the seams, leaving a series of large rectangular cracks in the top layer of asphalt. Typical of the Northeast, water had been seeping into the crevices and freezing in the winter. Every year, the cracks grew wider. “It’s very hard to stop,” Winton said.
He worried the only solution was to start over. “I was thinking, jeez, what am I going to do?” Winton said. “I’ve got to tear that road all out, get all the concrete out of there, which is expensive.” That one repair would cost about $60,000, taking a 20% bite out of his $300,000 budget for road reconstruction.