Despite heaved concrete again wreaking havoc with traffic on Highway 3 earlier this week, Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation says it has no concerns about the integrity of the road.
For five years running now, joints in the concrete roadway surface east of Manning Road have buckled when temperatures soar.
“We are aware of four previous occurrences between 2014 and 2017 on the section of Highway 3 just west of the Town of Essex,” said Liane Fisher Bloxam, MTO spokeswoman.
Some of those occurrences involved multiple locations and one resulted in vehicle damage the ministry had to pay for.
Bloxam said the ministry does not believe there is a problem with the way the road was constructed. “This portion of Highway 3 was in good condition before the recent extreme heat.”
On Monday, a swath of concrete heaved across both westbound lanes of Highway 3 just east of Manning Road forming a speed-bump of jagged, unstable material. Police rerouted traffic off the highway while emergency road crews removed the crumbled concrete and filled in the crevice with cold asphalt.
“Crews have responded quickly to patch the area of concern and will continue to monitor all locations,” Bloxam said. Longer-term repairs will take place this summer, she said.
But Essex County engineer Tom Bateman said the ministry should be investigating why the road keeps buckling.
Bateman said concrete roads are supposed to be designed with shallow cuts every 10 to 12 feet to control cracking. Further apart, there should be “control joints” where the concrete is cut through its full depth to allow for expansion during hot weather.
“Concrete roads, because of thermal expansion, will expand,” Bateman said. When the control joints are not deep enough, not close enough together or if they become jammed with debris, the abutting edges of the concrete will push against each other, heave and crumble.
“They will expand and it has to go somewhere,” Bateman said. “It’s like an earthquake — stress builds up and it blows.”
Bateman said it has happened to a much lesser degree of severity on County Road 22 and Walker Road — both concrete roadways built and maintained by the county. There, the concrete merely spalled at the joints and repairs took place without road closures.
And in those cases, it happened after long spells of scorching hot weather — not on the first day of hot weather like what happened this week on Highway 3.
There’s a safety problem there
Bateman said it is suspicious that the damage to Highway 3 takes place annually in the same westbound section of the roadway and not elsewhere. Bloxam Thursday confirmed there have been no other instances further west along the twinned section of the roadway.
She would not comment on how much the ministry has spent repairing the heaved concrete.
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County Warden Tom Bain called the heaved concrete an added problem to an already dangerous highway. He and other county politicians have long called on the province to finish twinning the highway through Leamington to cut down on the number of fatal and head-on collisions on the two-lane portion. Currently, the roadway is a single lane in each direction from east of County Road 8 to Highway 77.
The regularly heaving concrete on the portion that has already been twinned adds to concerns. “There’s a safety problem there,” Bain said.
“The main concern with that road is safety — it has to be built properly.”
A vehicle drives over a patch of Highway 3 on Thursday after it was repaired for heaving during this week’s hot temperatures.
A patch of Highway 3, shown Thursday after it was repaired for heaving.