Cedar Valley Corp., LLC will be recognized as the recipient of two "Excellence in Concrete Pavement" awards at the 23rd Annual American Concrete Pavement Association awards banquet on November 30, 2012 in Marco Island, Florida. The awards program recognizes contractors, engineers and project owners who completed outstanding projects in 2011.
COUNTY ROAD CATEGORY
GOLD AWARD RECIPIENT
Hwy H-54, Montgomery County, Iowa
This project reconstructed seven miles of six inch concrete pavement that had been placed in the mid 1960's and had later received an asphalt overlay. This entire roadway was removed and crushed. After subgrade correction, six inches of recycled material was placed on the roadway platform.
Montgomery County specified a safety edge on this project. This new design concept is intended to mitigate edge rut issues. From the top of our seven inch paving, the safety edge sloped down to one inch thick over a one foot distance. To accomplish this design we set our paver up two feet wider and inserted a sloped false pan that established the required shape.
Despite 45 vertical curves, some as severe as 7.18%, and three narrow bridges that forced us to stop paving 100 feet short of each structure, we garnered 46.62% of the maximum smoothness incentive. Montgomery County Engineer Brad Skinner wrote the following positive comment regarding the project. "Challenges successfully addressed during the construction included a severe wind and hail storm, recycling of the original fifty-year-old pavement into a road base, working within a narrow construction area, and implementation of a new technology called "safety edge," designed to improve the recovery ability of vehicles that stray from the pavement onto the shoulder.
AIRPORT OVERLAY CATEGORY
SILVER AWARD RECIPIENT
Clinton Municipal Airport, Clinton, Iowa
This project was an ACPA Award winner primarily due to the numerous obstacles CVC crews overcame.
Chris Groth, Crawford, Murphy & Tilly Project Manager stated, "Throughout the course of the project, CVC was able to overcome adversity and setbacks due to high PCC and air temperatures to create a finished product that met or exceeded the flexural strength, smoothness and thickness requirements set forth by the Federal Aviation Administration's specifications."
The project specified 170 calendar days to complete. Hoping to get a head start in Iowa's short paving season, the runway was closed and work began on April 4, 2011. The extended forecast offered a reasonable window to begin. However, we lost ten days to rain in April. May was also rainy and we lost over half the month to wet conditions.
Mother Nature was far from finished as springtime rains turned to sweltering heat when we started paving in July. Additional calendar days were lost as temperatures soared as high as 110 degrees during the day and cooled only into the mid 70s at night. It didn't take long to start bumping up against the maximum allowable 90 degree concrete temperature limit. Various solutions were tried in attempts to bring the concrete temperature within specification. First, we drained our water tanks and filled them immediately with cold water before we started our paving operation. This only gained us a short window of production before again bumping up against the temperature specification.
After trying the easy solutions, we were forced to rent a water chiller that had to be mobilized and plumbed into two separate water supply tanks. In Cedar Valley's forty years of paving in Iowa we have never had to use a water chiller to get our concrete mix temperature into specification. Adding to the misery during this period, the airport was struck by seven inches of rain in a two day period, saturating the on-grade portion of the project further delaying our paving operation.
Despite Mother Natures' efforts, CVC overlaid an award winning runway.
