By James Bowler

Frost boils may be on rise in PA

Mar 31, 2014 | 10:55 AM

A major foe to city crews is returning this spring and the city hasn’t budgeted any extra funds towards it.

“In the spring time as soon as it warms up there will be some occurrences where you get the frost boils occurring,” said Colin Innes, director of public works for Prince Albert. “I’m anticipating that we’re going to see a lot more frost boils this year.”

Innes said frost boils come from expanding frozen ground under the pavement.

“You’ll start having a little hump on the ground, and that’s the frost coming out of the ground,” said Innes. “What happens is that as that continues to happen the pavement starts to break apart, and then at the same time we’ll have the freeze thaw going on and then all that pavement starts blowing apart.”

He said repairs usually require cutting out the piece of pavement that is affected by the frost boil.

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“If the frost is fully out of the ground, if you cut a hole to cut out the piece of the asphalt that’s affected and you do a patch, it’s pretty much like doing a big asphalt repair,” said Innes.

However, the City has not budgeted for this predicted burst of boils.

“The thing that we would do is that if we wind up having to focus on this style of repair, instead of doing some segments where would fix a larger area where the pavement quality is deteriorating, but it isn’t all broken or total lost, it would have us just dealing with the reactive scenario of just dealing with the frost boil,” said Innes. “It would be really nice for us to have a larger budgetary ask there, but at the same time there’s really only so much capacity that you have with your crews and how much work you can get done.”

Innes added this will basically take away from preventative measures of road damage next spring from pot holes or frost boils created over the winter. 

He said last year Prince Albert didn’t have as many frost boils, but due to the amount of frost we’ve had this year he anticipates a much higher amount.

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