Potholes on your property, not on public streets
Our pothole work is on private property: home driveways, shopping center and office lots, church lots, apartment and condo drives, and private roads in subdivisions. Holes in a public street are the city-parish's to fix; report those through the 311 line. If you are not sure whether a stretch of pavement is yours or public, tell us where it is and we will help you work it out.
How a pothole patch is built to hold
- Cut square. We saw-cut a clean square or rectangle around the hole, out past the cracked and loose asphalt.
- Dig out. Broken asphalt and wet or loose base come out, down to firm material.
- Rebuild the base. Crushed stone goes back in and is compacted, so the patch has something solid under it.
- Tack and fill. The edges are tacked, hot-mix asphalt goes in, and deeper holes are filled in layers.
- Compact and seal. The patch is compacted flush with the surrounding surface and the seams are sealed against water.
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Why potholes keep coming back
A pothole starts as water. Rain gets into a crack, softens the base, and traffic pushes the weakened asphalt down until it breaks away. With the amount of rain Baton Rouge gets, a lot with poor drainage or unsealed cracks can grow new holes every season. Cold patch thrown into a wet hole is gone within weeks for the same reason. Fixing the patch properly is half the job; the other half is sealing the cracks around it and getting water off the surface.
When there are too many to patch
A few potholes in an otherwise sound lot are a patch job. A lot with holes all along the drive lanes, ruts and web cracking in between is telling you the base has failed across a wide area, and patching each hole becomes an annual bill. We will show you where that line is on your property and compare patching against an overlay or rebuild on our parking lot paving page. Smaller cracks and sunken spots are covered under asphalt repair.