A Challenging Repair Wins Love’s Asphalt 2023 Seal & Stripe Large Job Award

Designing and building a 37,000 sq. ft. new parking lot addition, while also maintaining another 270,000 sq. ft. of an existing lot, is a big job. It was a job the crew at Love’s Asphalt was more than ready for when Red Lerille’s Health & Racquet Club asked them to complete the work.

What they weren’t ready for? A giant sinkhole opening up near the entrance of the fitness center during the first few days of construction on the new lot.

“Red’s is a 185,000 sq. ft. club sitting on 20 acres,” Kristofer Love, owner of Love’s Asphalt Solutions, Lafayette, LA says. We have a long history of maintaining this lot and so when it came time for expansion, the club trusted us with the work.”

The racquet ball club is home to 10,000 members and the property owner wanted to add additional parking spaces to accommodate the growing membership. 

“Our crews began tackling the new lot construction first,”Love said. “We were digging down about five inches to develop the base and while we were hauling off dirt, our dump truck located a sink hole near the front door entrance of the fitness center. Luckily it was one of my trucks that fell in it and not someone else.”

So while working on the development of the new parking area, Love’s simultaneously had to repair the sinkhole - and fast. 

“Not only did we have to find the cause of the issue, we also had to complete the repair with a certain urgency since it affected the main entrance of the facility which brings in approximately 8,000 people a day,” Love said. “There are only two entrances into the area so we needed to get the repair done quickly to keep traffic moving in the facility.”

The crew presented the owner with a plan to replace the rotted out culvert and repair the sinkhole. They excavated a 30-ft. by 20-ft. area to make the repair and worked 15 hour days to get the work done. They dug the old rotted culvert out, hauled away the dirt, replaced 100 tons of rock and repaved the area with 4-in. of asphalt to get the sinkhole repaired.

“Our crew was able to locate a culvert 120 miles away, install it and complete the repair of the sinkhole in four days, start to finish,” Love added.

Then, believe it or not, the real work began.

New Construction & Pavement Maintenance

While Love’s Asphalt is very familiar with parking lot reconstruction, designing and building a brand new parking lot is not on the list of jobs they complete every day. 

“This was the largest new build that we have done,” Love says. “And with the exception of some dirt excavation on the front end, we did all of the work on this project in house.”

On the new addition, the crew removed approximately 450 yards of dirt and put down approximately 400 tons of rock. Next, they laid down 597 tons of asphalt at 2-½-in. compacted. Finally, the crew  installed 750 linear feet of 6-in. concrete risers, a task they weren’t initially hired to do, but completed to accommodate the customer and his schedule when another contractor fell through.

Next up on the docket was getting the existing 270,000 sq. ft. of pavement maintained. Love had worked on this lot before, so was familiar with what was needed to complete the work. They broke the area into phases and planned to seal about 30,000 sq.ft. each day to keep the lot operational. One entrance to the parking lot needed to be open at all times as well as access to the entrance of the building. 

The crew first patched 600 sq. ft. of damaged asphalt, then resealed the 270,000 sq. ft. parking lot using two application coats. Based on the current state of the pavement, Love’s chose to use Neyra Tarconite with an Armorflex additive and put it down in two coats.

“The first coat was applied using our SealMaster squeegee buggy followed by a coat using our SealRite with a spray wand,” Love says. “The reason I went with one squeegee coat and one spray coat is because I wanted to apply the maximum amount of volume I could on the initial pass and the buggy would get as much material into the pits and pores on that first pass. 

“Then I came back on top of the lot with a spray coat at about a 60 square foot per gallon ratio,” Love continues. “I wanted to coat the pavement very well so that it would hold for a long time. This is a common method for me on large lots.”

In all, the crew put down 9,500 gallons of mixed sealcoat with 2-lbs. sand per 100 gallons of sealer and 2-gallons of additive per 100 gallons. A total of 25 boxes of tar was used.

Upon completion of every section, a complete redesign of parking lot striping was conducted to align the stripes to correct errors from previous striping. 

“Years ago when they initially completed the striping, before we started servicing his area, none of the stripes were lined up,” Love says. “Each parking bay was not aligned with the following parking bay. After the lot was sealcoated,  we completed a new layout over the whole parking lot. We re-measured and re-striped so that when you look down the lanes, every line would match up.”

The crew put down 50 gallons of paint to complete this project in a total of 30 days, winning them the Seal & Stripe Large Job Award for 2023 for their hard work.

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