Concrete Repair in Chetek, Wisconsin.

Chetek puts all the material cost of replacing, repairing and maintaining a public walk on the owner who benefits from it, and the Common Council may spread that cost as a special assessment over no more than a single year, which is a much shorter runway than the ten annual installments the state statute allows. The city writes its own specification too: 3,000 pounds compression at 28 days, blocks no larger than six feet square, a quarter inch of fall per foot toward the curb, and six inches of thickness anywhere the walk crosses a driveway approach. A walk poured outside that specification is not a legal sidewalk in Chetek and can be ordered replaced as if nothing had ever been built there. Downtown along Second Street the lots are narrow with shared access, so the walk in front of one business runs straight into the next one, and a defective panel is rarely a single owner's question.

Four things take concrete apart here, and each one goes after a different part of a property. A sidewalk panel sits on saturated ground or over a root. The water under it freezes, expands and lifts the panel. In spring the ground thaws and settles, and the panel does not go all the way back down with it, so what was flush in October is a lip in April. Then a plow blade catches that lip every storm for five months and breaks the leading edge off it. A curb takes the plow head on. The blade rides up the gutter, catches the curb face and takes the nose off in chunks. Salted slush sits in the gutter longer than anywhere else on the lot, because the gutter is where everything on the lot drains to, so the gutter is where the surface scales first. De-icer does the same thing to flat concrete. Chloride pulls water into the surface and runs more freeze and thaw cycles through it in a season than the weather would on its own. The mortar skin comes off in flakes and the aggregate stands proud. The approach at the street is a joint between two slabs that belong to different people. The street sits on a road section and a deep base; the drive sits on whatever was there. Frost gets under the shallower one first, the apron cracks along the gutter line, and that crack takes water into the base under both of them.