Road behind Falcon Walmart shopping area to close Monday for two-week paving project
Scott Harrison
EL PASO COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) — Foxtail Meadow Road is only a quarter of a mile long, but it’s a popular shortcut for drivers to and from a Walmart and other businesses in a shopping center.
The road is in poor condition, so the county will close the road for at least two weeks, starting Monday, for a $700,000 resurfacing project between Woodmen Road and Rolling Thunder Way.
In several places, lines of potholes and large cracks cover the entire width of the road.
Officially, the county describes the upcoming work as a full-depth reclamation and paving.
“It’s when they grind up the existing asphalt into the existing base below the asphalt,” said Dan Gerhard, a county public works engineer. “And what that does is it provides us with a stronger base than what was there. Sometimes with some of our older roads, there was just a thick layer of asphalt on just dirt.”
He explained that while county officials aren’t certain of the road’s age, they believe it has never been resurfaced.
“If we had a good base section, we could perform a mill and overlay operation. But sometimes, we either don’t have enough asphalt or we don’t have any base. So, the straight mill option just doesn’t get us a product that we’ll be happy with, that will last as long as we’re looking for.”
On Friday, a surveying crew arrived to begin marking locations of utility lines in advance of the project.
Gerhard said that the reclamation will be less expensive than standard milling (removing old pavement) and repaving, because crews won’t have to transport the millings off-site.
“It’s one of our most commonly used rehabilitation techniques here in the county, and we’ve seen incredible results utilizing it,” he said.
Crews will also improve the south end of the road at the signalized, three-way Rolling Thunder intersection.