At first glance, Littleton looks like ground zero for Halloween pranksters this year — toilet paper is strewn across street after street and block after block.
The messy look prompted a few irritated inquiries from residents on the city’s Facebook page this week, like this one from Madison Lucas: “This is UGLY!! All over Littleton!!” Or from Stephanie Gregory : “My kids and I thought it was vandalism.”
But the TP’ing scheme is actually the work of the city itself. Littleton is using bathroom tissue as part of an effort to seal the myriad cracks that plague road surfaces in this city. It is tackling 120 streets with this bottoms-up tactic.
“I was trying to decide if there was a homecoming parade and wind had blown decorations off a float,” said Nancy Worthington, who noticed the paper all over a street near Broadway and County Line Road the other day.
Once she got an explanation from the city, she determined that the pavement patching process is a “brilliant idea.”
The TP, applied with a paint roller, absorbs the oil from freshly laid tar as it dries, keeping it from sticking to people’s shoes or car and bike tires. With the paper’s protective abilities, asphalt isn’t tracked all over the city or splattered on wheel wells. And the biodegradable paper breaks down and disappears in a matter of days.
“Since my car is new, I didn’t want it to get damaged,” Worthington said.
Kelli Narde, a spokeswoman for Littleton, said the real benefit of using toilet paper is that it allows traffic to retake the road right after a crack is filled.
“It means traffic has better access because we don’t have to close down a street to do the sealing,” she said.
Littleton is not the first to take this approach to wiping out cracks on its roadways. Lincoln, Neb., is one of a number of cities across the United States that have already spun the center roll to address deteriorating asphalt.
“We use it so we can keep moving and get more done,” said Clay Engelman, a district supervisor in the city’s street and traffic operations division.
He said the tar sets in about 40 minutes but that with the paper in place as a protective and absorbent cover, traffic can hit the street right away. The one big lesson learned by Lincoln: don’t use two-ply bath tissue. Engelman said the upper ply doesn’t absorb the oil and ends up blowing into people’s yards.
Lincoln has used toilet paper in its crack-closing campaign since 2014; Littleton began using it last month.
It’s not clear how many communities in Colorado rip from the roll when it comes time to blot the crack. The state’s largest city doesn’t resort to toilet tricks for its road repairs, according to Denver Department of Public Works spokeswoman Heather Burke-Bellile.
“We’ve never used toilet paper for crack sealing!” she wrote in a particularly declarative e-mail.
Amy Ford, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation, said she hadn’t heard of the practice being used in the state before. But she was more than willing to express her feelings about Littleton’s lavatory-linked labors.
“CDOT feels that clean cracks help improve the smoothness of everyone’s experience (on our roads),” she said.
The agency actually includes TP in its list of “blotting” materials for sealant application. According to the 2014 “CDOT Hot Mix Asphalt Crack Sealing and Filling Best Practices Guidelines,” a material may be needed to “reduce or minimize tracking of the sealant by vehicle tires. Common blotting materials include toilet paper, talcum powder, limestone dust, sand, or proprietary, spray-applied detackifiers.”
Narde said Littleton had been pitched a number of expensive blotting products but that toilet paper — single-ply, mind you — works best.
“Even though it looks like a Halloween prank, it works and it’s very inexpensive,” she said.
