Anyone driving that section of the path around the Falls just north of Spruce early Monday morning might have been blinded by all the bright orange in the road. From a distance, one could not tell what was going on, but obviously something was up. As the distance was closed, one could make out a procession of bright, shiny Oconto County Highway Department trucks.
We are not sure how many trucks are in the county fleet, as typically only two or three are seen in a group working on a project. But in this case there were at least a dozen, and some of them looked brand new. Reaching the intersection where County Road A heads west off of B, the answer became obvious when the giant blacktop-eating machine could be seen in position to begin gobbling up the surface. Apparently County A is being resurfaced, but it’s much more than a thin new layer on top of the existing road.
The hard surface was going to be reduced to a granular condition and perhaps returned to the country blacktop plant to be added to a new batch of blacktop. The nice thing about crushed rock, sand and asphalt is if you add enough heat and some new binder, the stuff is as good as new.
The process of reusing old blacktop surfaces has been around for a while, but typically the surface is ground in place and used for the base for the next layer of new material. With the material on County A, it looked like it would be going back to the plant, located less than five miles north of that road reconstruction site.
Just under 20 years ago, the large parking lot to the west of the Oconto Falls High School was reconditioned by Northeast Asphalt. Their machines ground up the deteriorated surface and laid down another layer on top. Since that time, sections of the surface were cut and replaced when electrical or other work needed to be done. It has held up well, but it’s getting a little tired and may need some reworking. Parking lot reconditioning is part of the August referendum.
Reconditioning or rebuilding of concrete surfaces is a little more complicated. To add strength, steel reinforcing rods are used when the concrete is poured. Heavier equipment is needed to break apart the surface. The combination of deformed steel reinforcing rods in the broken rubble was a problem, and in the past, the chunks of broken concrete would be hauled off to a distant location as land fill.
Observers of highway reconstruction in the Green Bay area can see that the process has changed in recent years. Rather than hauling off that broken concrete, the process now includes some monster machines that pulverize that broken concrete to the extent that the steel rebars can be separated, and the crushed concrete can be laid down as a base for the new road surface.
While those concrete crushing machines must be quite expensive, not having to truck the broken concrete out of the area must offset the cost. In the long run, this has to be kinder to the environment. The old adage of “Not working harder, but working smarter,” would seem to apply in this situation.
Working smarter makes sense in lots of situations. We are reminded of the two wood cutters who headed out to the woods early one morning. The first worked feverishly, chopping down one tree after another. He took no breaks, fearing that his productivity would be down. After all, he was paid by the volume of his work at the end of the day.
The second wood cutter started at the same time and worked hard, too. Every so often he took a break, not only to give his body a rest, but also to sharpen his axe. At the end of the day, it was the second wood cutter who had a larger pile of logs. Working harder is not always the smartest way to have a bigger pile at the end of the day.
That applies in a number of situations. That crew of orange trucks was involved in a process to make new roads in a cost-effective manner. The machine gobbling up the road on Monday morning was working the hardest.
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