MORGANTOWN, WV (October 3, 2012) – In the Ft. Martin/Maidsville area, over 700,000 coal trucks carrying 80,000 pound loads have used Mechanical Concrete® based industrial roads in the last 22 months with excellent results. “Reduced maintenance and normal surface wear are what we’ve seen so far. No rutting or pothole problems,” said Samuel G. Bonasso, REAGCO President, from the WV Oil and Gas Expo at Milan Park.
The performance of these Mechanical Concrete® coal haul roads has significance for the oil and natural gas exploration industry where new industrial roads and the upgrading rural residential roads are vital to success. “This technology can really help the oil and gas exploration industry solve one of their ongoing challenges—road maintenance. The unpaved coal road sections have experienced a 75% reduction in maintenance,” said Bonasso. Jerry Swartz, Fuels and Logistics Manager for MEPCO, which operates one of the gravel surface roads, called it first years performance “Amazing”. According to Swartz, “We usually had to add a couple of truckloads of stone a month to our road due to surface wear and deterioration, now it’s a couple of loads every four or five months.”
Seven separate sections of industrial road way were installed by Laurita, Inc. Morgantown, WV highway contractor, from December, 2010 to August, 2011. Both public and private roads near Maidsville, WV and the Longview Power Plant were improved with Mechanical Concrete® which is approved for project use by the WVDOH. The road sections wearing surfaces included 2 sections of reinforced concrete, 4 sections of asphalt and one section of a crushed stone. The various road segments carried average daily truck traffic of 200, 300 and 600 trucks per day. “It’s amazingly simple, cost effective and it just works,” is how Tom Laurita, president of Laurita, Inc. described it. “I’m enormously impressed that the Mechanical Concrete® roads we have built for the coal industry are carrying such a high volume of heavy truck traffic without even the slightest loss of structural integrity.”