Pothole Filling Machine

Remember when Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty called municipal leaders “pothole fillers and whiners?” It was our favourite sound bite of 2009. Well, the City of Charlottetown now has a machine to take over that task (not the whining, just the pothole filling).
The Public Works Department bought a new asphalt hot patching machine last year from a company in Michigan and is now putting it to work. The $30,000 machine takes crumbled asphalt from broken curbs and pavement, remixes it at a high temperature and uses it to hot patch potholes.

We like to picture it as a robot, but according to Public Works crews, it’s more like “a big oven.” It heats up the broken asphalt and keeps holes sealed up longer than the cold mix of fine gravel and tar.

The big orange machine being towed behind a city truck, crews take a blowtorch to dry the wet pothole so the material will bind to it, then pour the hot asphalt in before rolling it smooth.

“The machine will end up paying for itself within two years,” says Mayor Clifford Lee. And it will save the City money in the long-run. “It recycles old asphalt too, which is good for the environment.”

The real test of the machine will come in the spring when the freeze/thaw cycle creates a battle zone of potholes.