WINDHAM – A $1.1 million reconstruction project along a stretch of North Windham’s Route 302, completed by Pike Industries in mid-August, may not be up to specs.

Windham Town Manager Tony Plante said he and councilors drive Route 302 frequently and have noticed pavement grooves and washboarding along the reconstructed roadway from the routes 115/35 intersection to the Whites Bridge Road intersection, a distance of 1.16 miles.

Known as a “mill-and-fill project,” the Route 302 roadwork began July 14 and lasted six weeks with crews working at night to replace the top layer of pavement.

According to Plante and Maine Department of Transportation officials, the initial rutting issues that spurred the road reconstruction project, still remain.

“It’s not something we’ve heard much from the public, but it was something we observed,” Plante said. “At the very end of the initial work on the project, it was noted. It was something several of us had noticed and I just wanted to follow up on it.”

At a Town Council meeting last week, Plante said the project manager Denis Lovely, who oversees projects in southern Maine for the Department of Transportation, would be working with Pike Industries, the contractor, to determine what caused the reappearance of ruts. The ruts are particularly prominent in the approaches to the route 302/35 intersection, also known as Boody’s Corner.

When contacted Tuesday, a spokesman for Pike Industries, Steve Groves, declined to comment on the pavement conditions.

Lovely said he expected a crew to return to North Windham next week to take core samples of the pavement at the approaches to Boody’s Corner and Whites Bridge Road intersections, as well as spots in between.

“What we are seeing is a wash boarding of the pavement at a couple of the intersections [on Route 302],” Maine DOT spokesman Ted Talbot confirmed last week.

“It seems to be getting worse and worse,” Plante said earlier this week. “This is such an important route to the town of Windham and the [Lakes] Region, that we wanted to make sure we gave them [DOT] input of how the project could be handled in a way that is least inconvenient [for commuters].”

The samples taken by DOT road crews will help diagnose which layer of pavement is failing, Lovely said.

Along some sections of Route 302, the asphalt is about 14 inches deep, Lovely said. The core sampling will require lane closures and traffic control. As of Tuesday afternoon, the timeframe for the work had not been set.

“We will take a series of cores across the lanes in a couple of spots – in the ruts, and places where it isn’t rutted,” Lovely said. “We will then line up the cores, and we should be able to see the different layers of asphalt. It should be able to tell us which layer is failing.”

Due to weather, paving operations statewide must be completed by mid-November, but Talbot expects the Route 302 issues to be diagnosed and repaired before the snow flies.

“With any luck, we may still be able to get it done even if it is an underlying issue,” Talbot said.

“It’s nowhere near as bad as it was, but we are afraid it will be back to that point,” Lovely said. “We do these jobs and expect a 7-10 year life out of them [roads]. We don’t expect something to fall apart the moment we do it.”

When asked for his opinion about whether the road issues are a result of the asphalt mixture, Lovely said he did not want to speculate until the core sampling is done.

“That’s why we do the cores, so we can make sure we do pick the right treatment. So when we fix it, we fix it,” Lovely said.

The routes 115/35 intersection is a portion of Route 302 in North Windham that underwent a full road reconstruction this summer. Officials are now saying the job may be faulty and need repair.

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