March 29, 2024

Maintenance changes to improve road quality

While the conditions of roads across the county in general haven’t changed much since the beginning of the year, changes have still been made in maintenance practices.

Union County Engineer Zach Gunsolley said the system “overall is approximately the same as before.” But, the maintenance practices of Union County Secondary Roads has allowed for less damage to roads in the long run.

“Obviously a pavement usually doesn’t go bad a year after it’s constructed. It takes decades to deteriorate,” Gunsolley said. “So, a person wouldn’t see much different between now and the beginning of the year.”

However, Gunsolley has received comments about the decision to use a disc reclaimer on the front of the county motor graders, which cuts shoulders on gravel roads to allow water to drain off.

“That’s just making our existing system better as a whole,” Gunsolley said. “Some public have seen our improvements of our maintenance practices.”

The dry weather has been good for secondary roads employees because it has allowed various roads such as Pole and Cherry Street roads and H-24 to have the shoulders brought up flush with the hard surface. This prevents drop off along the road.

Coinciding with that, Gunsolley made the decision to increase the size of the rock being put on gravel roads to 1.5 inches. This is to help prevent large amounts of mud on the country roads across the county.

“With our mud holes that we had that I saw at the beginning of the year when I got here, I saw a need to increase the aggregate size of the rock in our rock roads,” Gunsolley said. “When roads and bridges deteriorate, it takes a long time for that road system to deteriorate. And, when it deteriorates, it takes a lot of time and effort to get it back up.”

The rock is put down before major rains and is stored on the side of the road in the form of a windrow, or a long row. After a rain, the road is too soft and the equipment too heavy to lay rock again, so a grader, which weighs less than a loaded dump truck, is sent out to bring the windrow of rock in across the road.

A dump truck with fresh rock can possibly damage a muddy road further, or even get stuck in the mud.

Eventually, Gunsolley hopes to reassess the needs of the road system during budget workshops in the coming season, which will allow him to decide if smaller rock will be on the menu. But, he said he won’t know until then, as he won’t know what the roads will look like in winter yet.

Concrete

Gunsolley has also begun a new project by adding concrete to the mix of new rock.

“We are doing some heavy maintenance and reshaping on a rock road east of Afton called the School Road, 190th Street,” Gunsolley said. “We’re going to see how it (concrete) performs, but, more importantly, it’s an opportunity.”

The project spans approximately 1 1/2 miles.

The concrete was crushed at CSI in Creston in the past several weeks and purchased at a price of $8.25 per ton, compared to $10.95 per ton of new rock from the quarry. The concrete can be reactivated after being crushed because there is cement in it, and Gunsolley plans to lay it down after the reshaping and use it to top dress the road, with the idea that the two materials will complement each other.

“It’s a process that I haven’t utilized personally very often due to the fact that the material isn’t readily available at any given point,” Gunsolley said. “The reshaping of roads, such as what the county did on Osage and Pole roads, ... would be of most benefit to a product like this because the base needs some strength when you’re doing major reshaping on a road, and it will provide a firmer base for that road on top than if we just purchased regular road stone rock from the quarry.

“In the absence of this recycled concrete, that’s all we have to use, but, we have the opportunity to do a little extra on this road.”

There will be approximately 16 tons of concrete for the project, which calls for between 2,000 and 3,000 tons of material. The county saved between $4,000 and $5,000 purchasing the recycled material.

The county employees have also utilized a new roller purchased this year. The roller compacts the road during rebuild, keeping the road from settling too wide and being too soft for the public when work is finished.