Asphalt Repair in New Orleans, LA

Asphalt Crack Repair

Cracks are how a driveway dies. Slowly, then all at once.

Here's the mechanic of it. A quarter inch crack lets rain straight down into the base, and in this town the base sits on clay that swells and shrinks with every wet spell and dry spell we get. Water in the base means a soft spot, a soft spot means a depression, and by next August that depression is a pothole with an attitude. Sealing early is the cheapest hour you will ever spend on asphalt.

Proper asphalt crack repair is not squeezing cold goop out of a tube. We rout the crack out with a saw so there's a clean channel with square shoulders, wire wheel the edges, blow it dry with compressed air, and pour hot rubberized sealant at around 380 degrees so it bonds to the walls instead of sitting on top like frosting. Deep cracks get backer rod first so the sealant doesn't just disappear down the hole. It sets up in half an hour or so and most driveways are done in a single morning.

What we won't do is seal cracking that has gone to alligator pattern. That's the base talking, not the surface, and sealant over it buys you a season at best. Honest asphalt repair contractors will tell you that patch is the answer there, and we say so before we start.

Paving Repairs

Paving repairs cover everything between a hairline crack and tearing the whole lot out, and my first job on site is figuring out which end of that you're actually on. The fix that solves a surface problem is money down the drain on a base problem.

Water is the villain nearly every time. Our clay shifts, the ground settles, and after three straight days of summer rain a soft spot under the mat turns into a bowl that sinks a little more with every delivery truck.

So I check the edges, where the water goes, and how deep the failure runs. Sound base, we cut it square and patch it, often inside a day. Base pumping mud underfoot, and no amount of hot mix on top will hold.

Honest asphalt repair contractors tell you that before the work, not after.

Asphalt Paving Repair

Asphalt paving repair is the whole range between a seam you can barely see and a hole that eats a hubcap on Elysian Fields. Down here the trouble almost always starts underneath. Our soil moves, water hangs around long after an afternoon storm, and the base fails before the surface ever shows it. That's why a skim patch an inch deep is back looking sorry by next August.

When I walk a driveway in Gentilly or a lot out toward Metairie, I'm looking at three things: raveled edges, spots still holding water a day after the rain quit, and whether the pavement flexes underfoot. Flex means base, and base means we cut it out full depth rather than paint over it.

Good paving repair fixes the reason, not just the ugly.

Parking Lot Asphalt Repair

A parking lot fails in patches, not all at once, and the patches are predictable. The dumpster pad, where the truck drops its forks and grinds. The entrance apron off the street, where every car hits the same three feet. The low spot by the drain that holds water for two days after an afternoon downpour, because water sitting on asphalt is how a lot dies young.

Most parking lot asphalt repair I do gets phased around your hours. We saw out the failed section, haul it, check the base underneath, then lay and compact hot mix. Fresh patch takes traffic same day, striping the next.

Skip the base check and you get a patch that sinks by summer. That is the corner cheap asphalt repair contractors cut, and you can see it from the sidewalk.

Infrared Asphalt Repair

Infrared is the closest thing this trade has to a do over. We set a heater panel on the bad spot, bring the existing asphalt up to around 325 degrees over eight to ten minutes, rake out the tired material, work in a rejuvenator, add fresh hot mix and roll it. No saw cut, no cold seam for water to sneak into. That seamless bond is the whole point of infrared asphalt repair, because a square patch with four edges is really just four future cracks in a trench coat.

It shines on birdbaths, sunken utility cuts and shallow potholes. It will not save a spot where the base has gone soft, and we will tell you that before we fire the panel.

Pavement has to be dry, so a wet afternoon in July moves us to the next morning.

Asphalt Pothole Repair

The pothole is the symptom, not the disease. Water got under your pavement, our high water table kept it there, and the base turned to soup until the surface caved in. So proper asphalt pothole repair starts with a saw cut, square edges, straight sides, and digging out every bit of soft material until we hit something that will hold a compactor. If the base is gone, we replace it. Then tack the edges, fill in lifts, and compact each one hot.

Skip the saw cut and you get a shallow patch with feathered edges that pops out by the second good downpour, which around here means next week.

A bag of QPR asphalt repair mix has its place for a hole that's eating tires on Tuesday, but treat it as a bandage, not a fix.

Asphalt Road Repair

A street is not a driveway with more room. Traffic never lets up, and the real trouble sits underneath, in that soft delta soil, where a lane settles an inch or two and nobody says a word until water stands in the dip after a Tuesday downpour.

So asphalt road repair starts below the surface. We saw cut full depth, haul out the failed material, and take a hard look at whether the stone base is still carrying anything. If it isn't, we rebuild it. Then we tack the vertical edges and lay hot mix in lifts, rolling each one while it's still hot enough to matter. Tack coat is the step that gets skipped, and a patch without it peels at the seam by the second summer.

Private roads, apartment drives and subdivision streets get the same paving repair. Length, depth and keeping one lane open change the work.

Total Asphalt Repair

Sometimes a patch is just a bandage on a broken leg. When the base under the mat has turned to soup, total asphalt repair is the honest answer. We saw cut a clean square edge, pull out the old asphalt and the failed stone beneath it, and then look hard at the subgrade, because in this city the culprit is almost always water. A bad slope, a low spot that ponds after every afternoon thunderstorm, or a line that's been weeping under the yard for years. We correct the drainage, bring in limestone base, compact it in lifts rather than one lazy dump, then lay hot mix and roll it while it's still hot enough to move.

A small full-depth section is a day. A whole driveway runs two or three, plus curing before heavy trucks park on it.

What the job involves

Most asphalt repair around here starts the same way: we find out how far the damage actually goes. A pothole on the surface is usually the last thing to fail, not the first. Our soil moves, water gets under the pavement, the base washes out, and the top layer collapses into the hole that was already there. So we saw cut a clean square around the bad spot instead of chasing the crumbly edges, then dig out until we hit something that will hold.

If the stone base is soft or full of water, we pull it and put down fresh crushed limestone, compacted in lifts. Skip that and you get a patch that looks great in March and sinks by the time the first real August downpour rolls through.

Then tack coat on every vertical face, hot mix in, and compaction while it is still hot. That last part is where a lot of asphalt repair contractors get lazy. Under compacted mix looks fine and ravels apart in a season.

A single patch on a driveway off Elysian Fields is usually a few hours. A parking lot with a dozen failures and some asphalt crack repair mixed in runs a day or two, weather permitting, because we cannot lay mix in standing water.

You can drive on it once it cools, generally the same afternoon.

What it costs

Nobody loves an answer that starts with "it depends," so let me tell you exactly what it depends on.

Square footage matters less than depth. A surface patch where the top course has raveled is a different animal from a pothole that has punched through to wet subgrade, and around here, with the water table sitting where it does, a lot of them have. If the base is soft, patching over it is like putting a new roof on a house with a rotten sill. It looks fixed until the first real rain. So the honest price for asphalt repair rides on what we find when we cut the edges square and dig, not on what the hole looks like from the curb.

After that: access, mostly. Can a truck and roller get to it, or are we hand tamping behind a gate on a narrow Uptown lot? Drainage fixes, tie-ins to a concrete apron, saw cutting, hauling spoil, restriping a lot afterward, all of that moves the figure. Volume helps too. Sealing thirty feet of cracks costs more per foot than sealing three hundred, because most of the day is setup either way.

Call us with the address and roughly what you're seeing, and we'll give you a real number instead of a range wide enough to drive Endymion through. Good asphalt repair contractors price the repair, not the guess.

Why choose us for this

You've got a patch out back that's been eating tires since spring, and honestly, you'd rather think about almost anything else. You want somebody to show up, fix it, sweep up, and then leave you alone about it for a good few years. That's the whole wish list.

So here's what we won't do.

No number that grows: The figure we write down is the figure on the invoice. If we cut it open and find the base underneath is soaked, we stop and show you before anybody spends another dollar.

No two jobs at once: Once the crew is on your property, they stay until the last patch is rolled. None of that "we'll be back Tuesday" that turns into a Terminator impression sometime around Labor Day.

No pressure to sign today: No expiring discount, no clipboard hovering by your elbow.

No mess left behind: Millings hauled off, saw cuts swept, striping put back where it was.

We are not the cheapest of the asphalt repair contractors you'll call, and that's deliberate. We saw-cut square edges instead of feathering into a crater, we compact the base in lifts, and we tack every joint, which is the hour a cheap crew skips and the exact seam that opens up after the first real August downpour.

Nineteen odd years of patching and asphalt crack repair in this ground, and the estimate costs you nothing and obligates you to nothing.

Frequently asked questions