Soft Road Blues Solution

Engineered Rubber Aggregate has been using Tire Derived
Aggregate to permanently eliminate springtime soft road problems
for decades in rural Manitoba.

Our company has the material, tire derived aggregate (TDA), the
knowledge for cost-effective permanent solution for seasonal soft roads.
The low-cost solution is gravel and a specialized fabric, which lasts for a
few years. Engineered Rubber Aggregate’s solution is permanent, and it
doesn’t cost much more.

Civil engineers know how to build roads that won’t soften when spring
arrives, but it is a costly method requiring three-to-four-inch mineral
aggregate as the base for the subgrade. This type of road construction
is usually reserved for major provincial highways carrying heavy traffic
year-round.

Most provincial roads and secondary highways have weight restrictions
on them every spring to prevent major damage, which diverts some
traffic to municipal roads. When municipal roads become too soft to carry
the local loads, transportation costs add up for rate payers forced to take
detours, postpone commodity marketing and deliveries, and pay to repair
the damage done.

Engineered Rubber Aggregate (ERA) has developed a system that
dramatically cuts costs by utilizing TDA type ‘B’ to replace coarse mineral
aggerate to strengthen the road’s subgrade. TDA has the material
properties which, when combined with proper placement and installation
method, eliminates the soft road problem permanently.

Utilizing coarse mineral aggregate to strengthen the subgrade can put
that solution out of reach in most municipal road maintenance budgets.
Waiting for the subgrade to dry out and firm up is the most common
way to deal with the problem long term, but the time lost, and loads not
delivered, is more costly than it may initially seem.

The key to building frost resistant roads and highways lies in the
subgrade. The subgrade is the material over undisturbed soil on which
the road is built. If the road is built on soil that wicks moisture into the
roadbed from the undisturbed soil, the road will soften during the spring
thaw. Once the water is in the road bed, it freezes onto saturated soil
layer as the frost penetrates the road. The amount of moisture in this
frozen layer will dictate the degree of damage that occurs when the soil
warms up and ice turns to water. The discolored wet soils that come to
the surface, locally known as frost boils, are the visible result of saturated
sub-grade thawing.

The subgrade must be designed to prevent water from wicking up into
the roadbed. Type B TDA is the perfect material for this job. It is made
from rubber tires shredded into strips two to three inches wide, and
SOFT ROAD BLUES SOLUTION
up to ten inches long. It weighs roughly one third as much as mineral
aggregate per cubic yard, has five to six times the insulation value,
and is coarse enough to prevent moisture wicking.

TDA creates a
thick mat strengthening the road base, preventing moisture wicking
and frost penetration into soil, resulting in road that will carry loads in all
seasons indefinitely.