State spending $3.4 million to fix recently completed jobs

Those problems have raised questions about how the Vermont Agency of Transportation goes about its business.

“People aren’t getting their money’s worth out of the transportation department and the engineers there,” said Warren Miller, owner of the Elmore Store.

The overhaul and repaving of nearly 4 miles of Route 12 in Worcester and Elmore goes right past Miller’s store. The work began in late August and should wrap up this week.

The work is needed to fix parts of a larger $4.95 million project in 2010 in which several miles of the roadbed were rebuilt and new pavement laid down.

However, “the 2010 project did not perform as well as was expected,” said Mike Hedges, a member of the Asset Management and Performance Bureau at the Vermont Agency of Transportation. “We received multiple complaints about the rough ride during the winter months and early spring.”

And now, the agency is spending nearly $1.8 million to fix part of it.

Repairs at the Route 15 roundabout in Hyde Park are already completed, but installation of a traffic light and realignment of the intersection at the southern end of the Morrisville bypass continues to back up traffic.

The price tag for those two projects? About $1.65 million.

Route 12 failure

Part of Route 12 has to be done because one element of the 2010 project — the cement-stabilized reclaimed base treatment — didn’t work quite right.

That treatment involves adding a small amount of cement powder to the already-rototilled roadbed to help stiffen it.

“It’s crucial to figure out the right amount of cement to add,” said Ken Robie, project delivery bureau director for the agency.

However, that figuring is as much art as science. Different types of roadbed material require different amounts of cement powder. And in 2010, the process was still fairly new.

When it works, the cement adds the right amount of stiffness to the roadbed. When it doesn’t, the roadbed gets too stiff, acts like a concrete slab and then starts to shift and crack during Vermont winters. That causes cracks in the pavement above, opening holes for water to work its way down and make the problem worse.

Anyone who has driven Route 12 during the winter since 2010 can tell you that’s what happened. The section now receiving a makeover had dozens of the cracks and subsequent bumps. Every year, the problem got worse, and the state had to step back in to fix it.

Miller isn’t sure why a process that is so uncertain was used for a multimillion-dollar project. He notes that the same process was used on Route 12 between Elmore and Morristown a few years after the earlier treatment had started to fail.

“Why did they use the exact same process from Elmore to Morrisville, knowing it had already failed?” Miller said.

A test dummy

In the Route 12 work this fall, four different types of treatment were applied along 4 miles of the state highway.

Three of the treatments involve different depths of pavement being ground up and then new pavement being laid down. The fourth treatment reseals cracks along the road, using various methods.

Why so many different ways to fix the same problem?

Because Route 12 isn’t the only road where the problem has occurred. It’s been found on a handful of others and the agency wants to know what fix works best.

“This project was developed to address this problem with several different treatments in the hopes that we would be able to utilize the treatment(s) in other locations,” Hedges said.

“We don’t want to be chasing our tails on this,” said Richard Tetreault, deputy secretary of the agency. “We are hoping to learn from this problem so if we come up against it in the future, we know the most prudent and cost-effective way to fix it.”

Tetreault said trying different fixes require more tools, and can add cost, but he thinks having the same contractor do all the work should help reduce other costs.

Robie also said that, when the cracking problem occurs, “there isn’t a patented fix, aside from tearing it all up and doing it again, which would be very costly.”

That’s why the agency is trying different solutions, but it’s also possible that “the results of the test may lead to further work on Route 12 in the future,” Robbie said.

That doesn’t sit well with Miller, who sees the experiments as a waste of money.

“The engineering department just needs to come up with a better way to build roads,” he said.

A summer of do-overs

Tetreault acknowledged that the Hyde Park roundabout, Route 100 traffic light and Route 12 work “could be interpreted as redos” but added that all three involved completely different circumstances, not broader planning issues at the agency.

The $650,000 roundabout project in Hyde Park was needed because the state decided to try a low inner truck apron that might cut down on wear and tear on plow trucks in the winter. However, a lower truck apron meant cars could go faster through the roundabout, so the agency had to come back this year and fix it.

The traffic light at the intersection of historic Route 100 and the bypass is being installed because the agency underestimated traffic volumes at the four-way intersection. That job is expected to cost just over $1 million.