This city is so used to holes in its pavement that folks name them, decorate them, and put a Mardi Gras beads on them like a shrine. Funny until it's your driveway.
Every one of those started as a hairline nobody bothered with. A quarter inch opens up, an afternoon thunderstorm sends water straight through to the base, the clay under us swells and shrinks like it always has, and by the next summer that little driveway crack has friends. Asphalt crack filling is the cheap, boring, unglamorous step that keeps you out of a full replacement, which is the opposite of cheap and boring.
The same crew that runs our local asphalt paving service handles this crack work across New Orleans and the parishes around it, Metairie, Kenner, Gretna, Chalmette, on driveways, church lots, restaurant lots off Magazine. Here's how we operate. We show up when we said. We route and clean the cracks before we fill them, because hot rubber poured over dirt and grass peels off in a season and we're not interested in doing your drive twice.
We don't lean on you, we don't talk over you, and we sweep up. Your phone calls get answered by a person.
Below I'll walk you through how we seal driveway cracks step by step, what changes the number on your estimate, and the questions people ask me before they book. Read on, then call and I'll come look at it myself.
Seal Driveway Cracks
Your driveway is not a parking lot, and it does not need to be treated like one. But it does move. Our soil here shrinks in a dry August and swells the second a thunderstorm parks over the city, and that seesaw is what opens a quarter inch gap down the middle of a slab that looked fine last spring.
Once water gets into that gap, it gets under the asphalt, softens the base, and the crack becomes a low spot, then a pothole. That is why we seal driveway cracks before the edges start crumbling. A blown out edge cannot be sealed, it has to be cut out and patched.
Most homes we handle take a morning. We clean the channel out with compressed air, pull the weeds and the old loose material, then fill with hot rubberized sealant that flexes instead of cracking again. You can usually drive on it inside an hour.
Crack filling on a residential drive is the least expensive thing our local asphalt paving service does, and it buys you years.
Pavement Crack
Not every pavement crack means the same thing, and reading them right is most of the job.
A single straight line running with the direction of the pour is usually a joint that opened up, and it takes crack filler happily. A web of short interconnected pieces is different. That's alligator cracking asphalt, and it means the base under your lot has gone soft, usually because water found its way down there during one of our July downpours and never really left. Filling it is like putting a bandage on a broken leg.
That area needs cut out and patched.
Width matters too. Anything from about a quarter inch up holds sealant properly. Hairline stuff is too tight to take material, so we watch it. Our clay moves, and those lines usually widen on their own by the next summer.
What the job involves
Start with the cleanout, because that's the part that decides whether the work lasts. We wire out the weeds, rout the crack where it's ragged, then blow it clean with compressed air until nothing but bare asphalt is left. Sealant sticks to asphalt. It does not stick to dirt, oak leaf mulch, or the little grass forest growing out of a Gentilly driveway seam.
Then it's hot rubberized sealant, melted in the kettle to around 380 degrees, poured into the crack and squeegeed flat so nothing sits proud of the surface. We dust it with sand so you can back the truck out without tracking black stripes into the garage.
Timing is simple. Most residential asphalt crack filling runs two to four hours. The pavement has to be dry, and it has to stay dry, which in a New Orleans August means we're watching the radar like everybody else at three in the afternoon.
What goes wrong: cold-pour caulk out of a jug. It shrinks, it cups, and by the second summer it's pulled away from both walls and you're right back where you started. Filling a damp crack is the other one. The moisture flashes to steam and the sealant foams up like a bad roux.
Cracks wider than an inch, or spidered out into alligatoring, aren't crack work anymore. That's patching, and we'll tell you straight when we seal driveway cracks whether yours has crossed that line.
What it costs
What it costs is driven by how many feet of cracking you actually have, not by how big the driveway is. Two long straight runs down a Bywater drive is a short morning. A lot with grass growing out of every joint is a different job, because all of it has to be cut out, blown clean and dried before any sealant goes in, and that prep is where most of the labor sits. Width plays in as well.
Anything wide enough to swallow a quarter gets routed first, and routing is slow work. Access moves the number too, since a lot we can back the melter into prices better than a tight courtyard where everything goes in by hand.
Ring (504) 607-7395, tell me roughly what you're looking at, and we can put real money to it.
The cheap version skips the cleaning, and dirt is the one thing sealant will not stick to.
When asphalt crack filling is the wrong fix
Sometimes asphalt crack filling is the wrong call, and I would rather tell you that in your driveway than after you've written a check. If the edges crumble when you press them and the pavement flexes under a tire, the base has quit, and no pavement crack stays closed once the ground below it is moving. What you want there is asphalt driveway repair: saw out the bad section, rebuild the stone, lay hot mix into it.
If the surface is checked all over like dried mud, we'd be chasing lines for a day and the rest would open after the next afternoon downpour. That's a resurfacing driveway job, with asphalt milling first if your grade has already crept up over the curb.
Hairlines under about an eighth of an inch won't take sealant anyway. Those belong to driveway sealcoating.
And on a lot where the pavement is sound and only looks tired, fresh parking lot striping buys you more than sealant nobody notices.
Why choose us for this
You've got a driveway or a lot splitting open and what you actually want from an asphalt crack sealing job is to hire one paving company, once, and not have to babysit anybody while they do it.
The number that grows between the phone call and the invoice usually grows because nobody measured. Somebody squints at the surface, throws out a figure, then finds twice the footage once the truck is parked on it. I measure the run of every crack, look at how wide and how deep they've got, and check whether we can get equipment in without moving your fence.
I am not the low bid. The cheaper sheet almost always skips cleaning, and if the crack isn't blown out and the grass roots aren't cut off the bottom of it, sealant is sitting on dirt and lets go the first wet stretch we get.
Nor will I pour into a damp crack to keep a schedule. It skins over, looks perfect, and peels out in strings.
The estimate costs you nothing and you're free to sit on it.
Frequently asked questions
Will filling the cracks make my driveway look worse?
Not worse, but be honest with yourself about what you're getting. A filled crack is a black rubber band across the surface, and it stays visible. It does not vanish. What it does is stop water from getting under your slab, which is the whole ballgame down here where the ground moves and a quarter inch crack becomes a two inch trench after one wet spring. If you want uniform color, sealcoating a week after the asphalt crack filling cures gets you there.
How soon can I park on it?
Hot pour rubberized sealant sets up in roughly 20 to 30 minutes, and you're driving on it the same afternoon. In August, when the pavement is running well over 120 degrees by noon, we give it longer or the filler picks up tire tread and you track it onto your garage floor. We usually do the work early and ask you to stay off it until evening.
Is crack filling the same as sealcoating?
No. Filling is repair, sealing is protection. Sealcoat goes on maybe 20 mils thick and will not bridge anything wider than a hairline, so people who try to seal driveway cracks with a squeegee are wasting a bucket. Fill first, seal second.
How do we get started?
Call the office. We walk the drive with you, measure the linear feet of driveway crack, and get you on the schedule. Weekdays nine to five, Saturdays when a job genuinely can't wait.
Contact New Orleans Asphalt Paving now
Contact us about asphalt crack sealing anywhere in New Orleans and you're talking to the paving company that will actually be doing the work, not a scheduler reading off a screen.
Tell me roughly how many feet of cracking you have and whether it's a house drive over in Broadmoor or a lot taking delivery trucks all day, and I will come out and walk it with you.
What I'm looking at is how wide the seams have opened, whether the edges are still solid or crumbling under a boot heel, and how dry the surface is, because hot rubber will not bond to a damp pavement crack no matter how good the material in the melter is. Length, access, depth and the shape the surface has got into are what move the number, which is why I'd sooner see it than guess.
Somebody is here through the week and messages get returned. Call (504) 607-7395 and tell me what you're seeing.