Concrete Repair in Fall Creek, Wisconsin.

Fall Creek puts the whole cost of a driveway inside the public right of way on the property owner, construction and maintenance both, and requires a new entrance to be concrete between the curb and the public sidewalk, on the grade of the curb and approved by the Director of Public Works. An entrance runs from 12 to 24 feet wide. Where the village reconstructs a street, 66 percent of the cost of rebuilding the sidewalk, driveway approaches and curb and gutter is assessed to the benefiting properties, so a frontage repair here is often part of a street project rather than a job on its own. A walk in front of a commercial or industrial building is at least eight feet wide and four inches thick, six inches through the driveway locations, on six inches of granular subbase.

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.