Bayer Construction At Work On Highway 18

Bayer Construction Company, Inc. is the general contractor on an $8-million Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) project to widen Highway 18 and reconfigure the intersection of Highways 18 and 113 in southwest Manhattan.

"The focus of the project is around the intersection and two

new bridges," said Kelly Briggs, president of the Manhattan-based contractor and rock producer. "We're taking an existing four-lane that has a kind of unique shape and turning it into a typical diamond intersection, building a new off ramp for traffic coming into Manhattan from the west. That involves rehabilitating the intersection and rebuilding the bridges. Instead of going across the bridge and having a strange loop that takes traffic under, the traffic will exit and come right down to a stoplight."

Bayer began the project in March with completion scheduled for the fall of 2006. However, because of some sequencing changes Bayer proposed and KDOT accepted, the project could be done four to six months ahead of schedule. "The way the bridges were sequenced originally was a difficult thing," Briggs said in late October. "With KDOT's approval we were able to change the traffic pattern to allow work on both bridges. The first bridge is complete and we'll be demo'ing the other bridge within the next week or two. We're hoping that with the sequencing changes we'll be done in early summer."

To make way for the reconfiguration, Bayer Construction's crew had about 180,000 cubic yards of material to move including Limestone ledges on each side of Highway 18.

"Geologically, the upper two ledges on the south side are ledges we crush in some of our quarry locations so we were very familiar with their characteristics and the challenges that they would pose from a drilling and shooting standpoint," Briggs noted. Because the area to be shot was near the roadway, overhead cable/power lines, and a 12-inch water main that supplies water to about one-quarter of the city, the crew used a smaller charge than they would have in a quarry.

"Buckley Powder of Kansas City helped us design the shot and it worked well," said Briggs. "We used four shots total and stopped traffic for about three minutes each time."

For the limestone ledge on the north side, the lower ledge, Bayer opted not to drill and shoot because of the proximity of homes. "That is a pretty soft rock and it is still used in the building stone industry but it is more difficult to drill and shoot," Briggs said. "Due to the combination of our familiarity with how hard it is to shoot the ledge and the homes nearby, we opted to bring in a subcontractor with a large rock trencher and he just cut the ledge. We had less risk from a liability standpoint and it worked out well. He made the initial cut and the relief cut and then we used our excavators to pull the material down and break it up into riprap."

Because most of the materials moved on the project were surplus, Bayer brought in a crusher to process them into a saleable product.

"We have about 100,000 cubic yards of waste material so we rented a crusher to crush the rock into 1-1/4-inch road stone and 1-inch to 3-inch filler material to market to the county customers we sell to out of our quarries," Briggs said. "We're doing a lot of recycling of the deposits here instead of just taking them somewhere as waste.

"We own three portable crushing plants but they are all tied up so we rented a Lippmann 4800 compact self-contained crusher, added the conveyors and went to work," said Briggs. "Once we switch traffic to the north side we have 4 inches of asphalt and 10 inches of concrete to tear out and we will recycle all of that for another project we're working on so the crusher is working out well for us."

Bayer's large equipment on the project includes Caterpillar excavators, a Komatsu excavator and Volvo articulated haul trucks.