It isn’t often you will hear a contractor say productivity is not important. In the case of road-repair projects, the urgency to complete the work is even greater. It’s the reason an 18-month road-repair project in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, required an extra push from one local concrete crew and a fleet of drilling equipment.
Sprague Road in Cuyahoga County is the main east/west artery between the cities of North Royalton and Parma. It sees a lot of daily traffic and has taken its fair share of abuse throughout the years. In early 2011, the Cuyahoga County engineers received an LPA grant to fund repairs. Akron-based construction company Cioffi/Liberta Construction won the project.
The original project scope called for the repair of approximately 53% of the 2-mile stretch. Cuyahoga County engineers estimated about 38,000 sq yd of concrete would need to be replaced. While a tall order to begin with, Cioffi/Liberta quickly realized the project was going to become much more challenging. Because Sprague Road is such a major road, the completion deadline was bumped up to six months – one-third the amount of time as defined in the original estimate. If that wasn’t enough, more of the road was in poor shape than the engineers originally thought, requiring the project scope to expand to replacing 77% of the 52-ft-wide roadway.
The concrete-patching portion called for the drilling of thousands of holes for reinforcement bars. Operations Manager Mike Totaro brought five pneumatic dowel drills from E-Z Drill for onsite drilling.
First, the Model 210 Twin Vertical was used to pull patches. Then the actual drilling began. The crew had an EQ MT 210-3 unit, a three-gang equipment-mounted unit, a Model 65B single-gang on-grade drill and two Model 210B slab-rider units, one single and one two-gang. During the project, the crew was drilling more than 1,600 holes per day.
They were able to keep up with the astronomical amount of drilling. The drills’ pneumatic characteristics meant more uptime, with less downtime for unforeseen problems like broken hydraulic hoses and fluid leaks.
Despite the project’s expanded scope and reduced timeline, Cioffi/Liberta successfully completed the concrete portion of the Sprague Road project in just three months. At the project’s close, Totaro calculated a total of approximately 41,000 sq yd of concrete had been replaced.
No other company in Cuyahoga County has done a project of this caliber in such a short amount of time, according to Totaro. The Cioffi/Liberta crew exceeded the ODOT and county’s expectations, much to the credit of hard-working employees.
