Tuesday, June 01, 1999
I-71 reconstruction sports layered look
Wear reflects modern economy
BY MICHAEL D. CLARK
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Interstate highway experts at the state's transportation department have engineering degrees, highly technical training and years of experience at repairing Ohio's highways.
But they are the first to admit that you don't need a college degree or technical expertise to detect the beginning of the end for a deteriorating stretch of highway.
Just steer your car onto the interstate, click off the radio and listen for the tell-tale, rhythmic “thump, thump, thump.”
“Everyone knows when a highway is starting to go bad. They hear it in their cars,” said Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) construction engineer Larry Weisman.
HIGHWAY REPAIR
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• A single, legally loaded 80,000-pound truck rig causes the same load stress on a highway surface as 9,000 automobiles.
• Surface temperatures on highways can range from minus 20 degrees in winter to 120 degrees in summer.
• To ease traffic delays, more interstate repair projects are done at night because transportation studies found that only 15 percent of drivers use highways between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
• The 17-mile stretch of Interstate 71 highway under repair in northern Warren and southern Clinton counties is one of the largest interstate projects in Ohio.
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Along Tristate freeways, the joints connecting highway sections eventually give in to the onslaught of 80,000-pound trucks, 140-degree annual swings in surface temperature, two-car families and corrosive road salt.
Add Ohio's temperate Midwest climate — with ground surfaces that freeze at night and thaw during the day — and you might as well paint a target on every section of highway.
But while most of these factors are evident to motorists, the specifics of highway repair rarely are.
Bumpy and crumbling pave ment are only the surface symptoms of an extensive, underground structural injury. The complicated cure consists of multiple layers of specially mixed materials; thousands of steel rods coated with space-age epoxies; tons of concrete; and thousands of large, 2-foot-deep holes dug at 20-foot intervals.
“Road work on the surface looks simple. But it's very complicated,” said Mr. Weisman, who is an 18-year veteran of ODOT and works out of the department's Southwest Ohio office.
He is supervising one of the state's largest highway projects as 17 miles of Interstate 71 in northern Warren and southern Clinton counties are
being torn up and redone. The work is to be completed in November.
Drivers often assume highway repair consists of little more than putting down another layer of asphalt. While that may be adequate for some patchwork repair on little-traveled, two-lane roads, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to interstates.
Modern highways are not continuous, paved roads, but rather are divided into sections ranging from 20 to 60 feet long with connective pavement joints linking the sections.
“The average person would be surprised at the detail,” he said.
Most of Ohio's highways were constructed in the late 1950s, 1960s and early '70s. The average life span of an original stretch of highway is about 25 years. Once the highway is repaired, the life expectancy goes down to about 12 years because of continued underground deterioration. Eventually, after repeated repairs, a highway and its substructure must be completely dug out and replaced.
The factors causing wear on highways spring from a multitude of seemingly unrelated aspects of everyday life.
Decades ago, when highways were being built, no one imagined families having more than one car, or that the trucking industry would overtake railroads as the primary means to ship goods, Mr. Weisman said.
Moreover, no one anticipated modern business inventory methodology — commonly referred to as “just-in-time” — being adopted by American businesses.
The process of factories and stores replenishing their shelves with parts or goods that are trucked in within a few days took advantage of the nation's extensive highway system — but at a cost to those interstates. Trucks became longer, heavier and more numerous.
“A single 80,000-pound, legally loaded truck has the same impact on highway pavement as 9,000 cars,” Mr. Weisman said.
“When the highways in Greater Cincinnati were first built, the traffic included about 5 percent to 10 percent trucks. But today that has grown to about 15 percent to 20 percent of all highway traffic.
“No one wants to live without the trucking industry; we couldn't survive without it,” he said, but added that the stress on highways is significant.
Regardless of what causes a highway joint to deteriorate, its replacement is a labor-intensive, involved process.
Drivers slowed by highway repair work are sometimes surprised to see the extensive and deep excavations revealing an intertwining network of steel rods. More often, however, they are simply irritated by delays in their travel.
Jean Haydon of Fairfield understands that frustration, but it's tempered by knowledge of the complexity of highway repair. “It's really amazing,” said Ms. Haydon, who works for Wendy's International in Union Township, Butler County and is a frequent traveler of Greater Cincinnati highways.
“If people understood the process, they might not get so angry when they are held up by road construction,” she said. “Besides, it's a necessity. If you want to get from point A to point B, it has to be done.”
Mr. Weisman likes to repeat a common saying among his colleagues hoping to bolster their patience with humor:
“Rome wasn't built in a day. And if it was, we'd hire their contractor.”
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