Just a little night paving

By Anna Mitchell  

FEBRUARY 1, 2010 12:35 p.m. (0)

Five months and counting – the stretch of Interstate 85 from 185 to Powdersville has been a less-than-smooth ride for the roughly 90,000 vehicles traveling to and from Anderson and Greenville counties.

Crews from Sloan Construction cut grooves into the pavement late last summer in preparation for repaving the 9½-mile stretch, but design complications and cold weather have delayed paving work that could have been done by now.

The rumbling will continue, Sloan area manager Doug Truluck said, until at least April when paving can resume.

“If we were able to work during the daytime, you could get some work done, but we can’t close any lanes until 8 o’clock at night,” Truluck said. “By that time you are losing temperature.”

Designs for the interstate repaving project call for two inches of asphalt to be laid down at night when traffic is lightest, Truluck said, which requires an ambient temperature of at least 45 degrees. Nights have consistently been colder than that since October.

“We had a good schedule if the design phase had kept flowing,” Truluck said. “We were still milling when we should have been putting down asphalt.”

Truluck said his crews would have been laying asphalt this past August if they hadn’t encountered complex sloping problems along the roadway. Concrete medians separate the north- and southbound lanes of 85 the entire stretch, and new asphalt cannot ride upside those medians more than a couple inches.

That is, if pavement gets too high on a barrier wall, it messes up its crash characteristics. On the other hand, if pavement laid across the roadway gets too thin, it can’t bear the weight of tens of thousands of cars and big rigs.

Laying down the pavement would not have been a problem, Truluck said, except that previous paving jobs along this stretch of 85 were not as careful as modern crews at making sure the road has a proper crown – or “cross slope” – along its entire stretch.

“If you have a flat spot in the road, water can collect,” Truluck said.

The South Carolina Department of Transportation is much stricter now than when this stretch of 85 was last paved more than 15 years ago at making sure road contractors stay within an inch or two of required slopes on a road, he said.

Survey teams verify down to the millimeter the elevations of a roadway from left to right.

“We are correcting years … every time you overlay a road, not everybody was keeping to tight criteria,” Truluck said.

About two miles of pavement has gone down so far starting at the Greenville County end of the job.

For motorists traveling 85 through the winter, the drive is likely to deteriorate, he said. Tires are wearing out the milled-up pavement and making bigger holes in it. Also, water is collecting in the grooves, freezing, expanding and further destroying the pavement.

Truluck said his contract calls for nighttime work only, but shutting down a lane or two on the weekends, when traffic is lighter, would speed up his work schedule.

Sloan’s $25.2 million contract with the South Carolina Department of Transportation calls for all construction to wrap up by winter of 2010.

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