FARMLAND – A couple of miles south of Farmland, State Road 1 travels past a water-logged, ice-age National Natural Landmarkthat is home to lizards, orchids and insect-eating plants.
It takes up only 13 acres. So state officials can’t finger the Cabin Creek Raised Bog for the “severe roadbed failures” that have occurred along a 6.25-mile stretch of the highway.
But the landmark isn’t the only soggy place beside the road, which the Indiana Department of Transportation was forced to close last week — less than four months after having spent $3 million to rebuild it.
At a coffee shop on Tuesday, residents said there are springs that discharge water onto the ground all along Ind. 1. “It is wet down there, no doubt about that,” said a State Road 1 resident whose water well is only 20 feet deep.
The state awarded E&B Paving a $3,025,843 contract for “full-depth pavement reclamation” of the highway from the bridge at Cabin Creek south of Farmland to U.S. 36 at Modoc. INDOT closed the road in April of 2014 because of severe pavement failure and reopened it at the end of November after E&B rebuilt it using a process called “rubble-izing.”
“It seems like E&B is getting a black eye but we did not design it,” E&B project manager Jason Gasaway told The Star Press. “We just bid on it per INDOT specs. Nothing failed with the asphalt. The problem is underneath. It’s in a wetland area. It’s saturated.”
“Rubble-izing” means to till up the pavement with a machine that is like “a rototiller on steroids” to “crumble it all up,” then inject cement into the rubble-ized asphalt, Gasaway said. “It sets up and gets hard. It’s as hard as a rock.” E&B then topped the hardened mixture with two new layers of asphalt.
South of Cabin Creek Raised Bog, The Star Press on Tuesday found several wooded wetlands right up next to the road and heard a chorus of frogs calling in spring. In a couple of other areas, the water overflowed onto the road.