Weather permitting, the San Juan County Public Works department was set to begin resurfacing nearly 27 miles of roads on Orcas Island beginning on Monday, May 12.

There will be a total of 13 non-rainy working days of chip sealing and an additional three to five days spent applying a finishing coat of emulsion, called “fog seal,” to the road’s surface. If there are no serious rain delays, the work is expected to be completed by June 3.

Maintenance is performed on County roads on a 6-12 year cycle with 25-30 miles resurfaced each year. To increase efficiency and reduce time lost in transporting equipment and supplies, this year the County has begun doing all of its maintenance resurfacing on a single island each year. (Next year Lopez will get all of the attention, San Juan Island’s turn will come in 2010.) All 21 members of the county’s road crew have been assigned to work on the Orcas chipsealing project.

Road crews will do more fog sealing this year than in the past. With the exception of a few experimental areas, all of the sections of road to be chipsealed on Orcas will be also be fog sealed – which means that a finishing coat of emulsion will be sprayed onto the road surface after the chipsealing is completed. Public Works senior project engineer Rachel Dietzman notes that fog sealing increases resurfacing costs by about 25 percent, but the County has found that it dramatically decreases the amount of gravel that comes loose from the seal, improves the appearance of the road striping and should increase its durability

The cost of the Orcas road project is expected to total $830,000.

A color coded map showing the roads and projected resurfacing dates on Orcas is available online at: www.sanjuanco.com/Docs/News/2008chipseal.pdf.