Garfield Road Rehabilitation
(Left) Before construction on Garfield Road. (Right) After construction.
WILLIAMS TOWNSHIP — Motorists are now enjoying a safer and smoother ride between US-10 and the MBS International Airport, thanks to 1.77 miles of recently completed upgrades along Garfield Road.
The Bay County Road Commission facilitated the project and chose to use cold-in-place recycling (CIPR) as part of the improvement construction process.
Cold-in-place recycling involves crushing the existing asphalt on an existing roadway, mixing it with an asphalt emulsion, then paving it back in place. Conventional asphalt construction normally requires the roadway surface to be milled off and then trucked away off-site. New material is then produced and trucked in before being laid back down as pavement. CIPR allows the contractor to remove the existing roadway material then re-apply it all in one linear fashion.
“Most aged asphalt roadways will eventually suffer from cracking but still have a good base foundation,” Spicer Group Project Manager Mike Niederquell, P.E., said. “The CIPR process focuses entirely on removing the upper layers of the worn roadway, grinding it all up, then putting it back in place using a recycling train. The CIPR recycling train is more cost-effective and has a much lower carbon footprint than that of conventional HMA asphalt surfaces. Trucking costs are minimized and less energy is used as the recycled mix does not require being brought to the hotter temperature as required at the plant.”
The recycling train normally consists of a specialized pavement-pulverizing machine with integral emulsion injection, mixing chamber, and lay down paving screed. It is also attached to an emulsion tanker that is supplying the emulsion to the mixing chamber in the pulverizing chamber. The material is pulverized, mixed with asphalt emulsion and laid back in place with a paving screed then compacted in place similar to a traditional HMA pavement. This regenerated layer becomes a solid base for the remaining paved layer(s) needed to complete the roadway. The benefit of using the stabilized base course is the structural number is more than double that of a traditional crushed pavement base. This results in needing less HMA leveling and wearing course thickness.
“For the Garfield Road project, the design called for the first three inches of existing asphalt to be milled off and hauled away,” Niederquell said. “We then milled another four inches for the CIPR which was put back in place and finally capped with two 1.5-inch courses of new hot mix asphalt.”
This section of Garfield Road is an important connector route for travelers looking to catch a flight out of MBS International Airport and is an important link for the Great Lakes Bay Region.
“We carefully put a plan together that minimized travel disruptions due to construction for anyone using Garfield Road especially those who had planned flights at the airport,” Niederquell said. “We set up temporary signing along US-10 that alerted drivers ahead of time and provided them with two different detour routes using Mackinaw Road and Midland Road—both adding on an extra mile or so of travel, but kept them out of the work zone.”
Major upgrades to the roadway included pushing 1,400 feet of ditch that paralleled Garfield Road further away to reduce the steepness of the slope and increase safety. This required acquiring an easement and installing 250 feet of 42-inch storm sewer.
“We also upgraded the barrier rails on the bridge over the Bradford Drain,” Niederquell said. “The original concrete barrier was crumbling and didn’t meet today’s safety standards.”
Existing barrier railing along Garfield Road over Bradford Drain.
New retrofitted guardrail over Bradford Drain on Garfield Road.
The existing concrete barrier was cut off and new guardrail posts were retrofitted to the base of the barrier foundations which provided support for the new guardrail. Modern guardrail approach terminals were installed in advance of the bridge meeting today’s standards as well.
This project is part of a combined series of 3.5 miles of roadway improvement projects implemented by the BCRC along Garfield Road stretching from north of Auburn south to the Bay/Saginaw County line (north of MBS International Airport).