How Can Landscaping Impact Your Brooklyn Sidewalks?

The natural environment and infrastructure often battle for space in Brooklyn, and they typically end up existing right next to each other. When sidewalks are built along roads lined with large trees with extensive root structures, homeowners and business owners often need sidewalk repairs to remove trip hazards and keep their sidewalks from violations. 

When your landscaping interferes with the infrastructure near your home or business, work with an experienced sidewalk repair contractor to eliminate the damage.

How Can Your Landscaping Damage Your Sidewalk?

Tree roots are often the source of cracking in sidewalks, and they're known to lift sidewalks. Once a sidewalk lifts over 0.5 inch, a trip hazard develops, and sidewalk repairs are necessary. 

However, existing cracks can allow roots to grow between them as well, further damaging the sidewalk. Tree roots grow not only outward but also upward, so pressure can push on a sidewalk from many angles. 

Root systems are so expansive that you may not expect them to damage a sidewalk from a certain distance away, but roots can extend 15 feet away from the trunk of a tree.

How to Repair Sidewalks Without Harming Your Landscaping

The roots near the base of a tree shouldn't be cut because these roots support the trunk of the tree. If they're cut, the tree is prone to toppling, resulting in potential property damage and bodily harm. 

Root pruning is a temporary solution, and it should be saved for times when no other option is effective or possible. Instead, sidewalk repairs should include slapjacking, shaving, or excavating. 

Slabjacking is a method in which concrete is inserted under high pressure underneath the low side of a lifted sidewalk to level the slab's surface. Shaving is an inexpensive technique in which a lifted sidewalk is gradually shaved down to form an even slab until the lifted segment is too weak to support the weight of pedestrians. 

Some sidewalk repair contractors excavate beneath problematic roots. The root will be left alone, and an air excavation tool will remove soil underneath the root. The hole beneath the root is either filled with clean pea gravel or left open. 

The void underneath the root provides a space for the root to grow instead of lifting the sidewalk above it. The excavating method is usually combined with reinforced or thicker concrete sidewalks.

If the landscaping has impacted the sidewalks near your Brooklyn home or business, reach out to Eden Sidewalk Repair NYC, an experienced company with experience in sidewalk repairs.