Post Mills
And for the 1,700 drivers who guide their vehicles down the 15-mile stretch of Route 113 that connects Chelsea to Post Mills each day, some motorists hear it as the sound of a slightly increased risk of an accident, posed hundreds of times whenever they venture down the road.
“Ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM,” said Glen Ferriot, who owns and operates his own prepared food business out of Baker’s General Store, on Route 113 in Post Mills.
“Ka-THUM, ka-THUM, ka-THUMP,” said state Rep. Jim Masland, D-Thetford, who drives along the road on his way to legislative sessions in Montpelier.
“Ba-DOOK, ba-DOOK, ba-DOOK.” said Niko Horster, who owns Shire Beef in Vershire and uses the road three or four times a week as he transports cattle around the area.
Each was trying to describe the sounds their vehicles made as they traveled down Route 113, which has, since the onset of winter, been characterized by literally hundreds of what appear to be small frost heaves that span the road in neat, lateral stripes running from shoulder to shoulder.
Area residents say that a bumpy ride is nothing new in Vermont, where the state Agency of Transportation classifies 36 percent of its roads as being in “poor” or “very poor” condition, but they expect more out of this stretch of Route 113, half of which was reclaimed, at a cost of $5.4 million, in 2010, and the other half of which was reclaimed, at a cost of $5.8 million, in 2013.
Both projects were done by contractor Pike Industries, and overseen by the state.
When the projects were completed, Horster said, he and other motorists enjoyed the smooth hum of fresh blacktop beneath their wheels, but that the honeymoon didn’t last long.
“The first winter after they did it, it started breaking,” Horster said.
During the 2015-2016 winter season, he said, he noticed something odd. Ordinarily, he said, frost heaves appear at the site of some sort of unusual feature of a road, like a low-lying pocket or a poorly installed culvert.
These cracks were different.
“They’re literally every 30 to 50 feet,” he said. “It’s gotten to the point where this is weird. This is quite different from anything I’ve seen before. People are noticing.”
The ubiquity of the cracks within the projects’ parameters led Horster, and others in the community, to come up with a working theory about what was happening to the road.
“This is not something that you can excuse just by frost,” he said. “This is a structural defect.”
And if the road is crumbling because it wasn’t built correctly in the first place, Horster said, he’d like the Agency of Transportation to answer a couple of questions for people in the community.
“Who came up with that idea?” he said. “And if it was the state, will they fix it?”
Bumps in the Road
Some in the Chelsea and Thetford area agree that the road has gotten significantly worse this winter, which has been marked by alternating periods of warmth and cold.
Horster called some of the cracks “brutal.”
“They stick up half an inch on these things,” he said. “It was literally like you hit a pothole full-on. It’s not something you expect in the middle of a 50 mph area.”
Ferriot said he worries that the cracks could be disruptive enough in slippery conditions to send a car sliding off its intended course. “You get a little slide on that, and you’re done,” he said.
Mike Pomeroy, who owns Baker’s General Store, compared the road surface to a “kiddie roller coaster.”
Brett Fifield, who owns Fifield Auto Repair on Route 113 in West Fairlee, said the cracks have gotten so bad this winter that every passing tractor-trailer has become an event. “When a tractor-trailer goes by, it shakes this building pretty good,” he said.
He said he’s also seeing the impact of the rough road on the cars of his customers. When he’s working on a car, even if it’s just an oil change, he puts his hand on the bumper and performs a little test.
“I’ll bounce it a little bit,” he said. “If it keeps bouncing, you can usually tell.”
In recent months, Fifield said, he’s seen more cars and trucks come in with prematurely worn struts and shocks, and he attributes that added wear and tear to the condition of Route 113. “You can tell, if you just had the vehicle in before this road was done, you can tell the difference between then and now,” he said.
Replacing a vehicle’s suspension system can cost as much as $1,000. When a customer comes in, he said, he tells them, only half joking, “you might want to sit down for this news.”
He said he takes no pleasure in the added business, and wishes the state had taken a different approach to Route 113. “At this point,” he said, “I’d rather have it back to dirt.”
When assessing roads and prioritizing them for construction work, the Agency of Transportation weighs a stream of data, including both safety and driving conditions, according to Ken Robie, director of the agency’s Project Delivery Bureau.
“We certainly don’t wait to see if there are crashes,” he said.
In AOT’s most recent annual report, a map of fatal crashes from 2010 to 2014 shows none on that stretch of road, while its online inventory of road conditions, last updated in 2015, lists the large majority of this stretch of 113 as being in “good” or “fair condition,” with only slight rutting or cracking noticeable to drivers.
But there are five areas classified as “poor” condition, and one section — the very end, where 113 meets Route 110 in Chelsea — that is officially in “very poor” condition, the worst category, which is characterized by pothole-causing cracks, surfaces so rough that drivers experience discomfort, and areas where “drivers need to correct to avoid defects.”
Flawed Design?
Robie also answered questions about why this stretch of Route 113 has failed so soon after the state spent $11.2 million to fix it.
When the state considers taking action to fix a deteriorating road, one of the first things it does is try to decide whether the road needs to be reconstructed, or reclaimed.
Roads that are reconstructed from scratch last longer, but they often come with a prohibitive price tag — Robie said a recent reconstruction job on just three miles of Route 7 cost between $15 million and $20 million.
The other option, and the one that the state opts to do much more often, is reclaiming, which involves stripping off the blacktop, and then working with the base materials that are already there, grinding and repacking them before sealing them off with a new surface.
But engineers face a perennial problem — reclamation tends to result in a road that sags limply against the ground it rests on, a condition that makes it sensitive to shoulder dropoffs, deformities and other problems including, yes, frost heaves.
Ten years ago, Robie said, the state of Vermont piloted a reclamation strategy that was meant to address the problem of too-droopy roads by adding a mix of concrete powder to the base materials. The result, said Robie, is a stiffer road base, which doesn’t always conform to the sometimes-damaging changes caused by erosion and shifts in the ground.
When it floated a pilot program in 2007, Robie said, Vermont was following the lead of other Northern states that had reported success with the concrete powder addition. After the pilot program went off without a hitch, Robie said, the state decided to ramp up the practice. “It started becoming a design option in about 2009,” said Robie. “Today, we’ve got between 100 and 200 miles of that kind of treatment across the state.”
Not all roads treated with the concrete additive have had a problem.
In fact, Robie said, between 80 percent and 90 percent of the roads have performed as expected, and are better off for the concrete-aided stiffness buried within their base.
“Some roads are great. They look just like they did the year after we paved them,” he said.
But over the past few years, Robie said, it has become apparent that a handful of roads, including Route 113, were not performing well. Instead of being too limp, they’ve become too rigid.
“When it gets too rigid it cracks, because that’s what cement does,” Robie said. “A little water gets in, and then it freezes and heaves.”
Robie said engineers still aren’t sure exactly why the treatment is working on some roads and not others. It could have something to do with the moisture content of the ground in the problem areas. Or it could be that the workers used too high a concentration of cement powder, making the road more rigid than it was supposed to be.
Masland, the state representative, said it’s unlikely that the contractor went off-script. “The contractor doesn’t do anything that isn’t approved by the state,” he said. “Projects like this are pretty tightly controlled.”
Robie said it’s simply a case of field conditions producing a different outcome than lab conditions, but VTrans has since adapted its procedures to account for that gap.
“What we found in post-construction testing is the final product developed a far greater strength than the lab tests,” he said. “This led us to write tighter process specifications for the construction and to impose an overall reduction factor when determining the cement content. So far, since making those changes, we’ve not experienced similar severe cracking.”
Robie said the treatment probably won’t be used in any upcoming projects.
“I wouldn’t call it a moratorium, but at this point, because of what we’ve seen, we’ve put a very significant restriction (in place), until we get the research done to help us understand the variables,” he said.
Another project, completed this summer on an 8-mile stretch of Route 113 stretching from Thetford to Lyme, was also done by Pike Industries, but did not use the concrete additive and should not be affected, according to Robie.
The Path Forward
Robie said one of the other affected areas, Route 12 in Worcester, is the site of an experiment designed to help the AOT figure out how to fix roads like Route 113. There, spread out in patches along a two-mile stretch, the AOT has implemented six different types of fixes, ranging from simply sealing the joints of the road segments that have cracked to complete reconstruction.
The cheapest effective fix will likely, at some point, be applied to the rest of routes 12 and 113 between Chelsea and Post Mills, he said.
But that could take some time.
Robie said the state will want to observe the test sites for an extended period of time — years — before deciding which treatment option is the most practical.
In the meantime, he said, he wasn’t ruling out doing a more short-term fix on Route 113. But he also said the current driving conditions might not be the best yardstick to measure by.
“This is an anomaly year,” he said. “The winter’s been warm, cold, warm, cold, it rains, and then things just went crazy.”
When prioritizing projects, he said, AOT considers whether a road might be bad for a couple of months during the winter, and perfectly serviceable for the rest of the year. “As the weather changes, it may flatten out a bit,” he said. “It may require some warning signage right now, and then it’s a matter of looking at it again in the spring to see, ‘did it stay tented?’ ”
Masland said he wants to know more about whether state funds have been wasted.
“The first concern that comes to mind is the poor result for use of taxpayer money,” he said.
Though Masland has a civil engineering degree, he said he wouldn’t presume to second-guess the agency’s handling of the problem.
“If we were just sitting around having a beer, I would wonder if there’s a way to break up the stiffness under the pavement,” he said. “But I’m not telling VTrans what to do.”
Instead, he said, he was inclined to give the AOT some space to develop a plan of action.
“My role is to watch for further developments and see if they can come up with something less expensive than redoing the whole damn road,” he said.
Pomeroy, the owner of Baker’s General Store, said the projects on Route 113 cost him access to many of his usual summer customers, as local camps rerouted their traffic away from the construction — and his store. He said any solution involving another lengthy road project would be unwelcome.
“I don’t want the state anywhere near my business,” he said.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.