Roadbuilders call in help from Scotland

David Ewing isn’t your typical road construction foreman.

Ewing is from Scotland and flies back and forth across the pond to offer American roadbuilders guidance on a special new roadbuilding process.

The technique is just starting to be used in North Carolina, and the walkways around Wake Forest’s first traffic roundabout have become Ewing’s proving ground.

Ewing led a road construction crew from Virginia through the construction process last week, showing them how to build the walkways.

The walkways look like ordinary brick sidewalks, but they are actually made of superheated asphalt that is produced at the work site and poured onto the ground from a bucket.

From there, Ewing smooths the smoking material out. As it cools, workers use a metal stamp to imprint the brick pattern into the material.

While that may seem like a simple process, Ric Macey, with Prismo USA, says the material Ewing is laying is anything but simple.

“I like to call it a synthetic asphalt. It has plastic, sand and fiberglass in it. That makes this much stronger,” Macey said.

The increased strength adds to the durability of the product.

And, Macey says, using the superheated asphalt gives the mixture a better seal with the roadbed underneath.

“Because it is in an almost-liquid form when it’s applied, it becomes part of the road. Engineers like that a lot better because you don’t end up with two layers of asphalt,” Macey said.

Ewing, the world-traveling foreman, has literally been around the world teaching construction crews how to use the machinery that heats the asphalt and how to treat the material once it’s laid on the ground.

He has laid the asphalt in England, Turkey, China and, for the past four years, in the United States.

“The majority of the material comes from the UK,” Ewing says in a hard-to-understand Scottish brogue. “I fly back and forth between jobs.”

Ewing’s company is the only firm in the world that makes the unique asphalt, and the N.C. Department of Transportation agreed to let the company try out their product on the roadway in Wake Forest under the condition that they be allowed to monitor the durability of the work after it’s completed.

Ewing and his company have completed other projects in the Triangle, but this is the first built in a public roadway.

Macey says he doesn’t mind letting DOT monitor the site because the material and the process have been proven in other places.

“When we first came to the U.S., we started in New Jersey and in New England. We wanted to go where the conditions were the harshest, and we said that if we could make it work there, it could work anywhere,” Macey said.

The brick walkways are the last major piece of construction involving the roundabout.

Wake Forest town engineer Holly Spring said contractors still have a number of minor tasks to complete — such as rebuilding the sidewalks at the new walkways — before their work is done.