Pawtuckaway Lake Association

He's been maintaining the roads around the lake for 24 years. Now, Road Agent John Fernald talks about the ups and downs of maintaining Pawtuckaway's byways.

How long have you lived in Nottingham?

I’ve lived in Nottingham, in the same house on Deerfield Rd., all my life. My parents lived here all their lives as well. There are a lot of Fernald’s in town and we’re pretty much all related. My brother has the dairy farm up on the town square, which was the Cilley’s originally. The Cilley’s owned that farm back before the Revolutionary War. The Fernald’s on the lake are from the same tribe.

Have you come to Pawtuckaway Lake as a child or an adult for recreation?

I don’t use the lake now but when I was young I would go down to White’s Grove. Leonard White’s father Webster would let us swim on their beach. Webster Senior lived in the farmhouse at the entrance of White’s Grove. We used to go down every afternoon in the summer right up until I was 18 years old. Then I got busy.

How long have you been the road agent in Nottingham?

I started as Road Agent in Nottingham around 1984. But I was also Road Agent for two years back in the early 1970’s when it was an elected position. Then I came back to it in the early 1980’s after working at the State Park for 8 years as a maintenance mechanic. I worked there after the construction phase of the State Park was over. The construction phase was back in 1962 to 1965. The Park officially opened in 1966.

How would you describe the condition of the roads when you started as road agent?

Back in the early 1970’s it was very quiet here. There were so few people on many of these roads that you pretty much knew everyone’s name. By 1984 the condition of the roads was pretty similar to what you have today, except the traffic was a little lighter. And, we didn’t have to put as much material down on the roads to build them up. Other than that they haven’t changed that much.

How would you describe the condition of the roads now?

Today they are in better condition generally but they break down faster because there is a great deal more traffic than in 1984. The extra traffic really beats the roads up. The traffic volume drives the maintenance cycle. The washboard or ripples in the dirt roads is caused by the traffic, the more traffic the sooner those bumps appear. I spend much more time maintaining these roads today then I did back then and it’s all because of growth. I probably spend twice as much time now.

Some people think that if the cars went slower the roads would last longer and I have seen some evidence of that. I find that the longer stretches of road break down faster. Take Sunny Pines, it is a short section of road and doesn’t need the amount of care that a longer stretch like Seaman’s Point Road does. Maybe it’s the speed of traffic. People tend to drive slower on the short roads. But, I tend to think it’s the volume of traffic that has the most effect. Back in 1984 most of the houses were not year round, so the traffic volume was lower. And, people made fewer trips in and out.

How many miles of road are your responsible for?

I’m responsible for maintaining about 70 miles of road. Right now 26 miles of that are dirt roads. On the lake there are about 10 miles of dirt road, 5 on each side. I look at each road in town every week to determine whether I let it go or whether I need to jockey my time to fit it in. It takes about 5 hours to travel all the roads in town to have a look. Then you have to balance the priorities. Such as, is it a bus route? You get to know which roads fall apart easily and you cycle them in more often. I try to know where the problems are before somebody calls me. Really, I don’t get many calls from folks on the lake. 

It’s a balancing act. For example, I have a bridge project going on down on the Deerfield Road, when that’s in full swing it takes priority. Then you have to realign your schedules before things fall apart everywhere else.

How long does it take you to maintain all the dirt roads around the lake?

Basically, I can maintain the lake roads in two days if I work at it. It always takes longer to do the first grading in the spring because that is when you need the most new material put down. You get a lot of deciduous material, like leaves, that drops down on the road and gets mixed in with the mud, that doesn’t bond well. You have to rake that up. You start at ground zero every year with a dirt road.

How often do you have to visit each road on the lake over the course of a year?

The heavily trafficked roads I have to visit every three weeks or so. I don’t keep statistics on my visits to each individual road but, there is a guy who puts a notch in a tree every time I do his road and from that I say I’ve been there just about every 10 days. In a normal cycle I can do all the dirt roads in 7 normal working days. By working a lot of extra hours and weekends I can compress that into 4 ½ days. I can’t be everywhere at once. I can grade about 6 miles of dirt road in a day.  Of course, that doesn’t include meetings, purchasing supplies, managing my people, or dealing with things that go wrong.

How do you maintain a dirt road?

The sequence of steps you perform is very important, whether you are building a layered foundation for an asphalt road or grooming a dirt road. For example, I have graded some roads twice and others three times in the last seven days. You can’t rush it, you have to do what that individual road needs in whatever number of steps is required.

So, grading the roads is the primary method of maintenance for our roads?

Yes, but you have to be smart about grading the roads. In dry conditions if you grade the road it will actually deteriorate faster. You really need to wait for moisture. Moisture is an important part of a dirt road; you need it to hold the road together. Without it the road goes out of shape faster. We’ve had too much rain this spring, which destroys the road, so too much moisture isn’t good either. But generally you need moisture to bond or cement the materials together. In a real dry spell it’s very difficult to maintain the roads. You can lose over an inch a year of road surface due to dust and dryness. Or, a rainstorm can wash away the material. Things don’t always go to your favor.

I’ve tried to just cut the ripples off in a dry spell and it only lasts 2-3 days, maybe a week at the most. Sometimes you’ll see me out on the weekends. I’m not paid for that but if that’s when it’s raining then that’s the right time to be grading. That way the material packs down tighter and will last a lot longer.

If you have a road with a lot of volume and the weather conditions aren’t right, sometimes you have to throw your hands up and wait. If you work on it you’ll just be wasting your time and money. If you don’t have the proper moisture, the proper consistency, whatever you do is just going to fall apart. You have to make the judgment call sometimes. I try to utilize my time and budget where I can get the most out of it. It’s a lot of juggling; you have to be flexible.

With the time and personnel I have, I have to find ways to be more efficient. We have been using more crushed gravel and we found a source for better material.  We get our material from an aggregate plant that has a better mix of materials. It holds up for longer and packs down better. That has made a big difference in the last five years.

What is the biggest challenge you face maintaining the roads?

The price of materials keeps going up. Processed crushed material has gone up a dollar a ton this year. Asphalt products have gone from around $38 per ton last year to close to $58 a ton this year, that’s quite an increase. The supply side of this business is as important as personnel. If the materials let you down you can’t work hard enough to make up for it. You’ll just end up patching and revisiting the same problems over and over again. If you don’t have the supplies, quality supplies, to maintain a road properly you will seriously shorten the life of the road.

We’re not putting enough material down, really. If your maintaining 24 miles of dirt road and if you have a $20,000 appropriation in your budget for processed road material, that doesn’t go very far. For example, 1,000 tons of crushed stone is $6.25 a ton. You have the ability to buy roughly 3,000 tons. I’m using 60 to 70 tons of crushed stone per 100 ft. of road. That leaves me 4,200 ft. that I can apply that stone too. I have to use that wisely.

The growth in town also makes things more complicated. The steady increase in the volume of traffic makes it more difficult every year to keep up with road maintenance.

If there were more money available, would you maintain the roads differently?

I’ve tried different methods over the years, basically experimented on small sections of road. Some towns use magnesium chloride, a chemical, to maintain moisture on their dirt roads. That makes them less likely to wash out and stay in better shape. If you spent more money on the roads putting more material down you would have to spend even more money doing things to protect that investment, including putting chemicals down. It would be very costly. All the dirt roads could use more material but it would cost a lot to make them just that much better. And, if it’s too dry or too wet that investment can be wasted. It’s a risk. How much better could we actually make them and at what cost?

The way the roads are situated they create a lot of runoff into the lake. The runoff is contributing to nutrient overloading. In your estimation, what would it take to solve this problem?

The biggest challenge on the lake is that those old dirt roads weren’t designed with drainage in mind. When I first started this job in the 1970’s most of the camps were on stilts or on cement blocks. The water would run off of the road and just go right under the camps. People get upset about the runoff hitting their foundations but the water is going where it has always gone.

When they put those roads in they didn’t leave room for drainage, they didn’t leave a buffer of natural vegetation or put in sediment ponds. If you were building those roads today you would have planned it totally different. The size of the camp lots would be a lot bigger than they are now, they would have planned for culverts and laid pipe for runoff. You would have had zones of natural vegetation to stop and absorb the runoff.

The way it is laid out now there isn’t room for those things, the camps are right on top of each other. Maybe if everyone took a little bit of their land to be part of an overall scheme to deal with the problem, perhaps that would work. You do have one asset; most of the land on the side of the road away from the lake is undeveloped. That would be one heck of an engineering job, there are probably places you could make better and there are places where there is simply no room for drainage control. Frankly, this is too complicated a topic to speak on from the top of my head.

Do you do all of this by yourself?

I have two full time people plus myself. They do trucking, cut brush, patching, and some grading. I like grading because it gives me a chance to get a real good look at my roads. In the winter we get additional help to deal with the plowing. It takes about 7 people to do the plowing so we have 4 part timers who help us. We have 7 pieces of equipment for plowing operations. In the summer we have occasionally brought on part time people, not last year and probably not this year either.

Planning is a big part of it. In September you’ve got to be thinking about your winter operation, your sand and your salt. Your planning has to be a season ahead of the season you’re in. It’s something you learn as you do the job, you get more knowledgeable the more years you have into it.

The PLIA would like to thank John Fernald for keeping our roads in great shape all these years and for agreeing to be interviewed for this article.