Concrete in Cadott, Wisconsin.

Main Street carries Highway 27 through the village and holds the hardware store, the bakery, the library, the dental and chiropractic offices and the funeral home. Tower Drive on the Highway 29 side is the industrial street, with a plastics extruder in a building of 66,000 square feet and a maple syrup operation next door.

The thing that makes Cadott unusual is what happens in summer. The festival grounds on County S bring two very large music events through a village of fifteen hundred, and for those weeks every lot in town takes traffic it was never designed for. If you run a business here, that's when your surface ages, and June is the wrong month to be starting the conversation.

Concrete specifically in Cadott

Aprons and pads on the industrial side, at the extruder and the operation next to it, where the loading is genuine. In the village core it's usually the concrete apron that moved rather than the asphalt, and replacing one without resetting the other rebuilds the same step a year later. The joint between the two is nearly always the job here, not either surface on its own.

Concrete and asphalt move differently. Concrete is rigid and moves at its joints; asphalt is flexible and moves everywhere. Where they meet, that difference has to be absorbed, and if it's not, the joint opens. Once it's open, water goes straight into the base under both of them. This is why so many lots fail first at the dock apron, the dumpster pad and the garage apron. Not because those slabs were bad, but because two different the line where they met was nobody's. We pour the concrete and lay the asphalt against it, so that joint belongs to the job.