Concrete Repair in Menomonie, Wisconsin.

Downtown Menomonie had its streets, sidewalks and curb and gutter torn out and replaced in one project in the summer of 1997, with historic street lights, benches and brick pavers added at the same time, so a repair on that frontage ties back into a streetscape rather than a plain walk. The city requires snow and ice off the full width of every sidewalk and walkway by noon the day after the snowfall ends. Winter on a cleared downtown walk shows up as scaling, where the mortar skin comes off and the aggregate stands proud, and that is a different repair from a panel that has lifted. Out at the manufacturing and distribution sites the concrete that fails is the approach and the apron, on the thick outwash sand and gravel of the Red Cedar valley, which drains fast and moves when water runs through it.

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.