Instead of pulling Illinois out of the mud, Leet Denton and hundreds of others placed a fine coat over a growing mess in 1980. Opened in 1951, the Edens Expressway (I-94) was considered by many as the first major link of the region’s new super highway system. It was named after William G. Edens, who was a banker and major proponent of paved roads in the early 20th century. His sponsorship of the state’s first highway bond issued in 1918 transformed dirt roads into the product we see today. Edens indeed pulled the people out of the muck.
With the original highway crumbling in the late 1970s, the Illinois DOT decided it was time for a major reconstruction of the 15-mile strip. Together with two other contracting firms, Denton and his crew pulled off an impressive mix of industry firsts, including breaking up the old pavement to serve as the next sub-base.
As a way of celebrating the upcoming 50th anniversary of the interstate system in 2006, Roads & Bridges will be running a series of stories celebrating paving milestones across the country. Leading it all off is the second running of the Edens, 25-year-old concrete which is still in use today.
A whole half-dozen
IDOT was knocking them off one at a time. In the early 1970s, both the Kennedy and Ryan Expressways were rehabilitated. Then came the Stevenson Expressway job in 1976 and ’77. It was as if the agency were grooming the team of engineers and planners for the Edens, which offered a 135,000 average daily traffic count and extremely tight road-working quarters.
The reconstruction job was open for bid in March 1979, with IDOT breaking the project into six separate segments. Work called for the repaving of a total of six lanes, widening and strengthening of the shoulders, rebuilding seven bridges, reconstructing utility crossings and a heavy amount of excavating in order to lower underpasses to the federally mandated 14 ft 6 in.
The joint venture of S.J. Groves and Sons, Brown and Lambrecht and Denton Construction Co. saw this coming—and had a plan in place. The three submitted one bid of $113.5 million, then to ensure at least some of the work independently proposed bids on the six separate portions totaling $138 million. As it turned out, the low bids on the six combined for $132 million, making the joint venture total of $113.5 the logical choice. The savings and the use of one on-site operation made it practical to recycle the old pavement. Another bonus for using the joint venture came in the form of time. Work on the Edens was expected to last four years, but by working together and virtually nonstop, the joint venture completed the task in just two.
“It was unusual to run a job like that 24/7 back then,” Denton told Roads & Bridges. Denton is president of what is now called Denton Enterprises. “We worked on the Fourth of July. We worked all the time, and that leads to a lot of satisfaction on the part of the public. The road was closed down but something was happening. Too often you see all of the barricades up and nobody is there working. We had plenty of action. It was obvious progress was being made.”
Progress screamed at motorists during the first six months when the joint venture completed a whopping $60 million of work. “We did a lot of things at night because there was less traffic. It was a better time to do work. We did excavation, grading, drainage, pavement removal and the crushing at night. Getting ready to pave is what took up the most time.”
During the day, the joint venture seemed to have a handle on traffic management, according to project engineer Marty Burhans. “Normally, a project like this could cause untold problems with traffic flow of the 135,000 cars that travel the expressway daily,” he told Rural and Urban Roads back in 1980. “(Traffic) will be rerouted into two lanes each way for a short period of five to six months. In that time, the existing pavement will be broken up, picked clean of its steel reinforcement rods and separated into chunks of suitable size to re-lay the base for repaving.”
Crushing victory
The crushing operation didn’t always go like clockwork, at least not in the beginning stages. The removal of wire mesh during the separating process proved to be tricky—and burned valuable time. A belt with magnets was stationed above the conveyor to remove most of the steel, while workers handpicked the rest.
“Places we had to watch most closely were the transfer points,” project engineer Larry Price told Rural and Urban Roads in 1980. “We had to make sure the steel would go well through the jaws.”
The size of the crusher, along with some subcontractor inexperience, turned out to be the root of the problem. Originally two large jaw crushers, a Portec Pioneer 3042 and a Kue Ken 3042, were the key units at the plant. Crews fed a 30-in. conveyor belt that carried the rubble into the Pioneer 50-VE that included a 3030 triple-roll crusher, a third 1536 jaw and a four-deck-five-by-14-ft vibrating screen unit. The plant cranked out two products. The first was a 1-3-in. rubble product used as a porous granular backfill. The other was a 1-in. minus capping material.
After pinpointing the crushing problem, the joint venture switched to two Pioneer 4248 primary crushers. A Pioneer 2148 served as a backup.
“The larger the crusher the less chance there is for a block,” said Price. “You also have to consider the maximum and minimum setting on each crusher. The closer you can set the primaries down, the better steel removal you will have.”
Denton recalled a virtual takeover during the equipment transition.
“We ultimately took it away from (the subcontractor) and handled his equipment ourselves,” he said. “The subcontractor had all new equipment, but I don’t think he had the right equipment and he didn’t have it set up right.”
The northbound lanes were tackled first. Asphalt was loosened by a Cat D8 dozer with a ripper tooth and picked up by two Cat 977 loaders. The remains were then hauled away by truck.
Two Link Belt 312 pile hammers powered by Cat 830M wheel dozers chipped at the deteriorated concrete with a breaking force of 18,000 ft/lb. The 10-in. mesh-reinforced concrete was pushed into piles by two Cat D8 dozers. From there, concrete pieces were transported to the crushers. Initially positioning of the operation created minor problems until the concrete plant was eventually moved to a more central location.
“If we didn’t (recycle) it we had to haul it a long ways to get rid of it,” said Denton. “And there was lots of traffic, even 25 years ago. There were economies in the removal, and we had the sub-base right there on the job which cost a whole lot less than buying stone and bringing it in.”
After the 4-in. sub-base was placed, crews paved a 36-ft-wide continuous reinforced concrete pavement with a 20-year design life. After the southbound lanes were complete the following summer, over 300,000 cu yd of concrete had been placed.
“It has held up very well,” said Denton, who still travels the route on his way to the headquarters of the American Concrete Pavement Association and the Portland Cement Association in Skokie, Ill. “I’m proud of our accomplishments there. It was truly a great, great accomplishment at the time.”
Work is on the way
Unfortunately, the spirit of 1980 will be all that’s left in a few years. IDOT is in the process of scheduling a major rehabilitation of the Edens. Emergency maintenance was conducted this past fall. Bad areas of pavement were removed and the concrete replaced. “It really requires more patching work than our budget allows, but there were some locations that needed immediate attention,” Pat Pechnick, engineer of program development for IDOT, told Roads & Bridges. “The pavement needs to be patched and overlayed. The pavement structure is one of the reasons it has lasted this long.”
Pechnick also believes the Edens has been the beneficiary of lighter truck traffic over the last 25 years. About 4% of the traffic is of the multi-unit trucks which cause the most pavement damage. The Kennedy and the Dan Ryan handle multi-unit truck traffic in the 18-20% range.
