Concrete Repair in Onalaska, Wisconsin.

Onalaska puts the cost of building, repairing and maintaining a public walk on the adjacent property owner, and the code writes out what goes in. A commercial walk here is at least five inches thick where a residential one is four, it runs five feet wide, it slopes a quarter inch per foot toward the curb, and the concrete through a driveway approach is six inches. The permit comes from the Inspection Department at least three days ahead, a repair of 60 square feet or less doesn't need one unless the inspector wants a new grade set, and the City Engineer approves the forms before anything is poured. If the Council orders a walk replaced, the owner has 60 days after the notice before the city does the work and puts it on the tax roll, and seven days when the condition is called life threatening. The commercial frontage is the Highway 16 retail and the centers off the I-90 and US 53 interchange, and rebuilding an entrance there means the curb head comes fully out and goes back in.

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.