T&B flexibility gets it done for Webber Canyon project

May 13th, 2010

T&B flexibility gets it done for Webber Canyon project

A road improvement project in Washington State’s Webber Canyon proved to be a good demonstration of T&B’s flexibility in working with project partners for a successful design build.

This project involved approximately 60,000 sf of Wire Wall in a realignment of Webber Canyon Road to straighten, widen and level several miles of the route. There were 10 separate walls being built by the contractor, Tapani Underground. Some were cut walls and visible from the road and others were fill walls below the road and not visible.

Benton County originally bid the project following AASHTO codes but knew that a certain amount of optimization was going to be required to get the wall to fit the site — due to an irrigation canal directly above and behind the proposed wall. T&B’s experience helped to design a wall that worked well within these limitations. After the bid the County also expressed a desire to have a more natural-looking cobblestone wall face.

Webber Canyon projectT&B sent a Project Manager to the site for the first day to support Tapani’s crew as they started to build the first fill wall. Unfortunately, the 4–12" rock that was available for the cobblestone face was too large to fit through the wire mats without a lot of handwork, which slowed them down greatly. Tapani was considering adding a bar to the Grizzley sorter they were using in their shot rock pit to bring the maximum rock size down to about 6". Since the fill walls are below the road and would not be in public view, they were also considering switching to a 4" minus shot rock with lots of fines on the fill walls, along with some hardware cloth, as a means of speeding up the process.

A quick solution was needed.

T&B was able to customize the mats to have a larger, non-standard aperture size. This helped to better utilize the size of rock the contractor was able to produce from their source. This also helped them to increase productivity by reducing the amount of handwork that was required to place the rock at the face of the wall.

End result? The wall system with the custom solution allowed for the contractor to increase productivity and reduce cost and provided the county the aesthetic natural-looking, stone wall. Both parties were very happy with T&B’s flexibility in being able to help them stick to the schedule and conceptual layout.

T&B Structural Systems
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Fort Worth, TX 76120

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