THIS STORY COURTEST THE KINGSPORT TIMES-NEWS
EDITOR'S NOTE: YOUR DOUGLASS WEBSITE FIRST REPORTED ON THIS STORY ON FEBRUARY 3, 2010... THE LINK TO THAT STORY WITH PICTURES OF THE STREETS IS:
Lewis, Douglass and Carver streets suffered damage and had to be reconstructed.
By MATTHEW LANE
mlane@timesnews.net
KINGSPORT — A lot of traffic in a short amount of time took its toll on three key roads in the Riverview community, resulting in the city of Kingsport recently spending more than $34,000 on repairs.
Over the past four years, the Riverview neighborhood experienced a major overhaul and face-lift — demolishing the old Riverview Apartments complex and replacing it with 32 rental homes and expanding and renovating the V.O. Dobbins Sr. Complex.
Both projects cost about $8.4 million each, during which time numerous construction vehicles, dump trucks, supply trucks and other heavy equipment came in and out of the neighborhood on a regular basis.
This resulted in three roads suffering damage — Lewis, Douglass and Carver — and having to be reconstructed, said Ronnie Hammonds, streets and sanitation manager for the city. The work included some curb repairs, but no sidewalks needed to be repaired.
“Due to several different circumstances we had to do some reconstruction of portions of all three streets and the repaving of the three streets,” Hammonds said. “There was a lot of concentrated work in a short period of time over those sections of the roadway.”
The reconstruction work was done using a technique called full-depth reclamation with a cement stabilized base. More than 300 tons of asphalt was also used on the project.
“It’s a process where we take our asphalt zipper, rip up the road about 12 inches, and add cement in front of the machine and till the cement into the work we’ve done,” Hammonds said. “It brings a cement stabilized base, then we repave over the top of that.”
In addition to the traffic, other factors played into the damage to the road, including the age of the streets and the bad subsurface conditions of the ground, Hammonds said.
“Several sections of town there are soils not conducive to construction, that area being one. The base is not the best in the world. But the roads are not substandard and have held up fairly well over time,” Hammonds said. “Before construction started we noticed we were getting alligator cracking over sections of the roadway, which is an indication of base failure. The contractor had no fault; it’s just one of those things. Hauling in the brick and cement trucks, we just had a road failure happen.”
Kingsport crews performed the work, which took about eight days to complete, wrapping up a few weeks ago. The material cost of the project came in around $34,000 and was paid for by the city. Hammonds said labor costs were estimated to be $10,000.
