Engineers receive state honor

    The Washington County Engineer?s Office recently received an award for the quality of its work on Vine Avenue just east of Riverside that occurred last year. The county was given an award for having the ?best concrete overlay? greater than 6 inches deep. Assistant County Engineer Jacob Thorius, project engineer Jake Hotchkiss and engineer Jeremy McLaughlin received the award at the 46th annual Concrete Paving Workshop in Des Moines on Feb. 4.

    Thorius said he was very pleased to receive the award, and even more so because it came from his peers in road construction.

    ?This was a nice honor and it really reflects the tremendous work put in by our staff,? said Thorius. ?It means even more because the award is given by other people in the concrete paving industry.?

    Winning an award is nice but it?s not the reason county employees try hard to improve the quality of roads, said Thorius.

    ?We don?t anticipate getting awards when we?re doing the work,? said Thorius. ?Our main concern is putting out a good product that will serve the public for a long time, whether that?s a road, bridge or culvert. We work to ensure that the end result is something that county residents can use for several years.?

    When the county looked for roads that needed repair last year, Thorius said that the section of Vine Avenue (W64) just south of Highway 22 was high on its list.    

    ?Vine Avenue was in really rough shape,? said Thorius. ?It had a lot of potholes and the driving surface was very bad. It needed quite a few safety improvements.?

    Thorius remarked that the county had also been made aware of the road?s conditions by the county residents who had to drive on it.

    ?We got complaints all the time about the potholes,? said Thorius. ?Potholes are especially dangerous when they?re on a highway because of the speed of the vehicles traveling on them.?

    In July 2009 the county began pouring concrete on that section of Vine Avenue. By the end of August, the county had paved a four-mile stretch of Vine Avenue from Highway 22 going south to 160th Street. In the process, the road was widened from 20 feet to 24 feet.

    Close to 20 homes lie on the stretch of Vine Avenue that was repaved. Thorius said that during construction the residents had to park their cars just off the highway and then walk, sometimes up to one-quarter mile, to their homes from there.

For the full article, see our Feb. 15 print edition.