Sinkhole and Drain Inlet Repair, Public Storage, Dundalk MD

A sinkhole in a parking lot is almost never a pavement problem. It is a drainage problem that has finally reached the surface. Water escaping a failed joint or pipe carries the base material away underneath, the asphalt spans the void for a while, and then it stops spanning it.

That is why this is an excavation before it is a paving job. The void has to be opened up, the cause found at the drainage structure, and the base rebuilt and compacted in lifts before any asphalt goes back down. Patching the surface without doing that leaves the washout in place and the hole comes back.

A self-storage property makes the consequences worse than the size of the opening suggests. Almost the whole site is drive aisle, box trucks and trailers run the same narrow routes all day, and a soft spot under one of those paths carries far more load than the same defect would in a parking bay.