Morton residents who live on streets in the East Lewis County community that underwent an attempted Otta Seal treatment late last year are being asked to move their vehicles and trash cans off those streets next week as Granite Construction crews will be sweeping and rolling loose gravel off the streets starting Monday, April 14.
The work is expected to go throughout the week until Friday, April 18, and will be carried out daily beginning at 6 p.m., according to a City of Morton Facebook post. Road workers will be doing the work at night so there is less traffic.
“At this time, we ask that anyone parked on a city street that has been Otta Sealed with gravel, please move your vehicles and garbage cans off the street so the sweepers can effectively do their job in cleaning up the streets,” the post stated. “Any vehicles blocking the ability to sweep the streets will be towed at the owner's expense.”
This work is being carried out to identify the scope of gravel shedding that resulted from the attempted Otta Seal project done to the city’s roads starting last October. It was a Washington state Transportation Improvement Board (TIB) grant-funded project.
Otta Seal is an asphalt surface treatment constructed by placing a graded rock aggregate on top of a thick application of a relatively soft binding agent oil. Some consider it a cost-effective alternative to traditional chip sealing, and it is named after the Otta Valley in Norway where it was originally developed in the 1960s.
However, the Otta Seal in Morton appears to have failed, as for several months now residents have had to deal with potholes, mud, excessive gravel and dust on the city’s streets, as previously reported by The Chronicle.
After next week’s road sweeping and rolling is complete — which is also being funded by the TIB — engineers will evaluate the conditions on the streets to determine what the next course of action to repair them will be.
For more information, call the City of Morton at 360-496-6881 or message city staff on their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/CityMorton.
