National road paint shortage felt here as road construction season starts

The rules of the road may be fainter this year.
The Associated General Contractors of America has been warning officials nationwide of a "growing shortage" of highway paint and possible price increases.
Wisconsin is already starting to feel the effects of the shortage. Thomas Notbohm, a state Department of Transportation engineer who manages the paint supply, said Tuesday there may not be enough paint for projects where lanes have to be shifted and new, temporary lines need to be painted.
"Some of our orders that might have taken a couple of weeks to fill before, are out there to 30 to 90 days, and that pretty much puts us in late summer, the latter part of the painting season," Notbohm said. If time presses, and prices increase, "we may have to prioritize which markings get done first."
The state buys 200,000 gallons of paint annually to put white and yellow stripes and dashes along 60 million lineal feet of roadway, Notbohm said, and this does not include new construction.
Highway paint gets harsher treatment and has a shorter lifespan in the northern states, where sand on winter roads has a scouring effect on the product.
Officials are still trying to figure out what the shortage may mean for state road projects.
"We are trying to gather more information, to see how it might impact us," said David Vieth, highway operations chief for the DOT. "We have seen some notifications from vendors about the problems they are having on the supply side."
The shortage is more in the yellow paint than in the white paint, he said.
The AGC trade group announced Monday that "we have been meeting ... to make sure the shortages do not cause delays in needed highway construction projects." The group's warnings came out a week ago.
Dow Chemical experienced plant breakdowns in April and May that led to a scarcity of important paint chemicals, the AGC said. Titanium dioxide, widely used as a whitener for paint and other products, and rosin esters, the primary resin system used in alkyd-based thermoplastic, have been in short supply.
Suppliers have announced price increases.
It's true, DOT officials said, that projects are not finished and a road is not opened for traffic until the pavement markings are down.
Notbohm said an alternative paint with raw materials slightly different and accessible might be available, though it may not necessarily be on the list of paints currently meeting high construction standards.
"Traditionally, the paint will last a year or less," he said. A longer-lasting, more expensive epoxy paint is also an alternative.
Vieth said officials are trying to keep news of shortage in context.
"These sorts of little supply problems come up pretty regularly, you never know what the next product will be, steel, asphalt, salt."