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Highway Contractor: Three Case Studies; Three Choices

HighwayContractor by Dan Brown, Contributing Editor HOT F FNF Construction earned mix quality bonuses averaging $2.30 per ton. NF Construction and the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) set the bar very high these days in hot mix asphalt paving on Interstate highways. Consider, for example, an 18-mile-long project on Interstate 10 in Cochise County. Not only did FNF achieve high rates of production on the $10.3 million project, but the company also won bonuses for both smoothness and mix quality. And, the project won a Quality in Construction Award from the National Asphalt Pavement Association and a Build Arizona Award from the Associated General Contractors. “We moved down the road pretty good,” says Clint Amator, FNF project manager. “On some days we laid around 3,000 tons, and we had a few days where we actually placed more than 5,000 tons. Over the course of the project, we averaged right at 3,500 tons of asphalt per day.” FNF ran a 24-hour trafﬁc control operation for the project. “We were working about an 18-hour milling shift to keep up with our paving operations, so we really had to resource the project 24 hours a day to keep the trafﬁc control running,” Achieving the high production/quality double on Interstate 10 Amator says. The contractor kept trafﬁc running in one lane at all times. ADOT limited the length of the one-lane closure to 4 miles. Using one Roadtec RX 900 milling machine, subcontractor Valentine Surfacing of Vancouver, Wash., milled the pavement at 12.5 feet wide. Depths of milling ranged up to 5 inches. “When we did the 5-inch milling we were getting roughly 2 miles per day,” Amator says. “But when we were actually milling 3.5 inches, then putting back 3 inches of dense-graded mix, we achieved close to 3.5 to 4 miles per day on that.” Amator says the major challenge of the project was the differential milling required to correct the cross-fall on superelevations where the pavement curved. As designed, ADOT called for the cross-fall to be corrected in the paving phase. But because ADOT and FNF practiced partnering on the project, ADOT accepted FNF’s proposal to correct the cross-fall in the milling phase. “If we saw a problem, we brought it up right away before it manifested itself into a real issue,” says Amator. “ADOT worked very well with us to listen to our concerns. For any potential problem, we put it out in the open and proposed a solution for them prior to having delays. Our handling of the super-elevations is an example of that.” The original plans called for increases in Better Roads August 2012 9

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