Asphalt Crack Filling in New Orleans, LA

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.

Asphalt Crack Sealing

Asphalt crack sealing and asphalt crack filling get used like the same word, and on a small lot they mostly are. The difference is the material. Hot rubberized sealant goes down around 380 degrees and stays flexible, which matters here because a pavement crack swells shut in an August afternoon and yanks itself back open on the first cold snap. Cold pour has its place on a narrow one. It won't hold on a crack that's still moving.

We rout anything a quarter inch or wider, blow it out with compressed air, then fill flush so tires don't peel it. Skip the blowout and you're gluing sealant to dirt and old crumbs. It lifts in a few weeks.

Alligator cracking asphalt is a different animal. That's the base giving up underneath, and sealing over it just hides the problem until the next rain.

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

Crack work gets priced by the foot, not by the square foot, so the first thing I do is walk the drive with a tape and count what's actually open. A hundred feet of quarter-inch cracking on a short Uptown drive is a different animal than a Lakeview slab that's gone alligatored across the whole apron.

Width moves the number more than anything. Anything under about an eighth of an inch we can't fill properly, it just skins over. A quarter inch to an inch is the sweet spot for hot rubberized sealant. Wider than that and we're talking patch material, which is a different line on the invoice. Routing, when the crack edges are crumbling and need to be sawn clean, adds time too. So does pulling weeds and dirt out of a driveway crack that's been ignored since Katrina.

Then there's timing. Our summer humidity means a crack that looks dry at 8 a.m. is still damp down in the throat, and sealant over moisture blows out by fall. We plan around that.

Call us and we'll give you a real number for your own drive, not a range wide enough to drive a truck through. Most residential jobs to seal driveway cracks are a half day, and asphalt crack filling on a small lot rarely runs past one.

Why choose us for this

So there's a crack running down the middle of your drive and you've been stepping over it since Carnival season, hoping it would sort itself out. It won't. Water gets in, our clay soil moves, a July afternoon cooks it wider, and by next spring you've got a pothole instead of a line. You want somebody to come out, handle it, and leave you alone about it for a few years.

Here's what I won't do to you.

No surprise math: the number I give you is the number on the invoice, unless you ask me to add work.

No vanishing act: once my crew opens up your driveway crack, they stay on it until it's routed, cleaned and filled. We don't disappear to a second job across the river.

No signature pressure: nobody's standing on your porch telling you the price expires at sundown.

No mess: the blower goes over the drive, the buckets and debris leave in the truck.

I'm not the cheapest quote you'll get, and I'd rather say that up front. Cheap asphalt crack filling usually means a cold pour squeezed straight into a dirty crack, which peels by fall. We've spent the best part of 19 years learning how New Orleans heat and rain chew up a driveway, and we seal driveway cracks with hot rubberized material that flexes when the ground shifts.

The estimate is free, and looking is not booking.

Frequently asked questions