OKTIBBEHA COUNTY – County supervisors have announced a partnership with Florida road firm Innovasoil to test chemical treatments that help prevent erosion and wear, eyeing a broader rollout if all goes well.
District 2 Supervisor Orlando Trainer distributed a press release Monday announcing the partnership, touting the chemical MH72 as an option to reduce maintenance costs and allow the county to expand its network of durable roads beyond what its budget would typically allow.
The pilot program will apply MH72 to the roughly one-mile length of Cannon Road, located just east of Clayton Village.
“If we went out and spent $2 million dollars on every road we could make them wide enough with proper drainage, but we just don’t have that in our budget,” he said. “When you start putting that money on the ground, that roadwork only goes so far. Hopefully this gives us some more options.”
MH72 is a liquid that, once it soaks into the soil, binds the dirt together in the base lawyer of the road to resist erosion, Innovasoil CFO Matt Fenner said Tuesday. Similar road stabilizers have existed for years in the form of an enzyme, but Fenner said MH72 eliminates voids in the dirt and provides a more flexible structure, allowing it to last 10 years without covering, 20 years with a chipseal aggregate cover and 20 to 30 years with full pavement.
Innovasoil has been developing and applying its road stabilizers for more than 25 years internationally, mostly in Europe and Latin America, Fenner said. It saw use in the Amazon Rainforest as a quick way to stabilize roads whose high clay content made conventional roadbuilding difficult. The company moved into U.S. markets two years ago, and has begun pilot projects with the Iowa Department of Transportation, Tennessee Department of Transportation and several counties.
“The past two years have been mostly pilots, and now we’re starting to enter into full-blown projects,” he said.
The full cost of the pilot project hasn’t been determined yet, with Innovasoil wrapping up soil sampling and finalizing an estimate of how much material is needed emerging in March, Fenner said. The county and Innovasoil will split the eventual cost between themselves. Work should begin in March or April, according to Trainer.
Road stabilizing enzymes with similar effects were applied to Cannon Road roughly a decade ago, Trainer said, but a proper surface was never applied to seal the deal. He’s heard of similar enzyme treatments that were applied to roads in other counties like Monroe and covered in a chipseal surface, and are still in place years later. If MH72 shows similar promise, he could see the county investing in a large push to expand its durable road network.
“What we’re working on is a big project, maybe a hundred miles throughout the county,” he said. “If we were able to do something like that it could be a game changer, it could enhance and improve our road system tremendously. At the end of the day our goal is to have the best roads we can. That’s going to be a journey, not a sprint.”
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