Everyone who drives down a New Mexico highway makes snap assessments of the condition of the pavement, but this summer teams of undergraduate students from the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University are examining every mile of every highway in the state. UNM civil engineering teams are evaluating roads in the northern half the state, while NMSU teams are taking the southern half.
The students work a four-day, 40-hour week on contract from the New Mexico Department of Transportation. The teams make careful evaluations of alligator cracking, potholes, crumbling edges or whether heavy trucks have worn ruts into the asphalt. They stop at every milepost and evaluate pavement distresses for one-tenth of each mile.
NMDOT Pavement Preservation Engineer Robert Young said the $15 billion investment in pavement on state highways is the single largest material asset owned by taxpayers and the department works hard to keep it in good shape. For the students, it’s meticulous, time-consuming work and by the end of the summer, the teams will have evaluated 16,000 miles of pavement.
Graduate Research Assistant Ray Waggerman, who correlates the written records and data files, manages five UNM pavement evaluation crews. He also handles expense reports and other record keeping to send current data files to Santa Fe weekly. In addition, he writes the annual report UNM will send to the NMDOT this fall.
“Many of our students are working their first summer job, and they have to learn how to keep expense reports and manage their time,” Waggerman said. “We also do quality assessment of their work.”
For Young, the payoff is in training a new generation of engineers to take responsibility for state highways, but there is also a financial benefit to taxpayers. The contract with the universities is about half the cost of hiring a private contractor to do the work.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu