Tarrant County is the core of the service area: Fort Worth itself, Arlington, the Mid-Cities and the northeast suburbs, and the towns ringing the lakes. This page covers the towns we work in, the three kinds of ground the county sits on, and the rules Fort Worth and Arlington apply when work reaches the street.
Fort Worth, Arlington, Mansfield, North Richland Hills, Hurst, Euless, Bedford, Grapevine, Colleyville, Southlake, Keller, Watauga, Haltom City, Richland Hills, Saginaw, Lake Worth, Azle, White Settlement, Benbrook and Crowley. If your address is in the county and the town is not listed, send it anyway.
Tarrant County sits across several natural regions, and they are different ground to pave on. In the south east corner is Blackland Prairie, rolling grassland on rich clayey soil. Through the middle run the Eastern Cross Timbers, deeper loamy soils under post oak and blackjack oak. The Grand Prairie has shallow clay over alternating layers of limestone and marl, and the Western Cross Timbers on the far west side mix loamy and clayey soils of every depth.
That is why two driveways a few miles apart can fail in completely different ways. On the clays, cracks follow the soil as it shrinks in a drought and swells after rain, and a drive can heave along one edge. On shallow soil over rock, the base is firm but water has nowhere to go and runs off across the surface and along the edges. On the sandier loams, unsupported edges wash out. The quote describes which one your drive is dealing with.
The Trinity River runs through the county from north west to south east, with its Clear Fork and West Fork meeting near downtown Fort Worth, and the county holds Lake Worth, Eagle Mountain Lake, Benbrook Lake, Lake Arlington and part of Grapevine Lake. Properties on low ground near the river and the lakes are where standing water and soft bases turn up.
The county's housing grew in waves. Its population went from 197,553 in 1930 to 361,253 in 1950 as the aviation industry and new roads pulled people in, and it has kept climbing since. So Tarrant has pre-war neighborhoods near downtown Fort Worth, post-war streets in the inner suburbs, and a fresh ring of subdivisions on the edges, and each carries asphalt of a very different age.
Fort Worth is prone to supercell thunderstorms, the kind that bring large hail and sometimes tornadoes. On 28 March 2000 an F3 tornado struck downtown Fort Worth and badly damaged many buildings. Hail rarely hurts an asphalt drive much, but every big storm brings out crews offering cheap paving from the back of a truck. A written measurement and scope is the difference between a contractor and a leftover load.
Sealing and crack filling behind the approach are not parkway work. An asphalt drive in these cities normally stops at a concrete approach, and rebuilding that approach is a concrete job done by a contractor who meets the city's requirements. If the paving contractor on your job does not, we say so and quote the asphalt without it.
No. The city's parkway standard for approaches is reinforced concrete. The asphalt drive meets it at the property side.
Almost always the clay drying out along the edge. It gets filled with flexible hot filler and sealed, and it may need refilling after a hard drought.
Usually a repair. Entrances fail first because every vehicle turns there. The potholes are cut out and rebuilt, then the lot is sealed and restriped.
Next door: Parker County to the west, Johnson County to the south and Denton County to the north.
