Concrete Repair in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.

Chippewa Falls writes its own sidewalk spec rather than leaning on the state statute alone: a standard walk is four inches thick, with an expansion joint every 36 feet or less, contraction joints marking five or six foot squares, a wood float and a broom finish run crosswise. The mix is air entrained at six bags of cement per cubic yard with slump held under four inches, and the walk is pitched a quarter inch per foot toward the street. An owner who disagrees with a repair order has 10 days to ask the Board for a review, and that request stops the 20 day clock until the Board rules. Cutting a new drive opening into existing curb and gutter is not a patch here either, because the entire curb and gutter has to be removed and reconstructed to form a standard drive opening, and restored within 30 days of the day removal began.

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.