Here it is the middle of Feb. and most of us are thinking about when we are going to get the next construction season going.  Yesterday being over sixty degrees made it seem like we should already be going. Old man weather is going to change our minds by tomorrow night, when we will have 4 to 7 inches of that white stuff on the ground.

Right now our workload is really on the light side.  We do have a job on hwy 6 in Poweshiek Co.  It is a widen and overlay from hwy63 to V18. The portable asphalt crew will do this job out of our Malcom plant.  The job is 36000 tons of HMA.  It will probably take about a month to complete the asphalt portion of the job.

The other big job we have to do is the racetrack at Newton.  This job will challenge us in a lot of ways.  Time schedule is going to very tight so I can see some very long days and maybe 7 days a week when it gets down to crunch time.  The track itself needs to be done by mid August with the first race being in mid September. Another one of the challenges will be placing rock and asphalt on a slope of  25%.  To put this in perspective that is three times steeper than the steepest supers we put on a roadway.  The banking on this track is designed at three different degrees. The bottom 16 feet of the track will be 12 degrees, the next 16 feet will be 13 degrees, and the top 28 feet will be 14 degrees of banking in the curves.  The track surface will be mainly granite, which will be brought in from Minnesota.  The asphalt cement is a highly modified A.C., which drives the price up.  It isn’t double in price, but very close.  The length of the track is 7/8 of a mile.  At this point in time I can’t tell you much more about the track but I will keep you up dated in the Manatt mirror.

I hope to see everyone in the spring and wish everyone a safe and productive construction season in 2006.