Concrete Repair in Colfax, Wisconsin.

Colfax holds commercial property to a different snow standard than the rest of the village. The walk in front of a business has to be clear by 10 a.m. every day, and if it is still snowing past ten, within three hours of daylight after it stops. The village also publishes what counts as a defective walk, and it adds a rule most towns do not have: where 80 percent of an owner's sidewalk blocks are found defective, the whole sidewalk gets replaced rather than the bad panels. Concrete in front of a commercial or industrial building is specified thicker than a residential walk, and thicker again where it crosses a driveway approach, so a Main Street or East Railroad Avenue frontage is not the same pour as a house. The calendar is written down as well: no opening in a street, alley, sidewalk or public way is allowed between November 15 and April 1 unless the Village Board calls it an emergency, and once a street has been repaved nobody gets a permit to open it for five years.

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.