Thhhhhhhbbbbbbbbtttttttt!!!!!
CAUTION: This post contains some boring Civil Engineering blather! Those who feel they can get through it may continue to read, all others should turn back lest they loose brain cells!
Okay, that said, I’m taking a break because my brain is currently still sizzling. I know, you thought you smelled smoke. It’s not that often that I actually use my brain. Anyway, I’ve been working for about 3 hours straight on this road in Pueblo, trying to save the Tax payers some money. Here’s the deal. Thad came up and said he needed me to run the quantities for the road, how much earth has to be moved, how much needs to be brought in, how much asphalt, gravel, etc is going to be used for this 6 mile road. Anyway, in order for me to do that I had to go in a modify all my templates because the pavement design has changed and I had to account for that. Keeping that in mind I had already modified the vertical alignment of the road last week. I had to raise the road 5 inches because the pavement structure Omaha District provided us with was 5 inches thinker than the one we had actually planned on using. So I got my templates adjusted, modified the vertical alignment of the road and ran my modeler. After I did that I used the modeler to generate new Digital Terrain Maps (DTM) for each element of the pavement structure and used those DTM’s along with the InRoads Volume function to figure out how much of what I had. In order to build this road we’re going to have to haul in close to 85,000 Cubic Yards of material (Ashpalt, gravel, etc.) That’s all fine and dandy, the problem lies in the fact that there is a very lop-sided number in the process when you start looking at earth work. See if you run the main template against the original DTM (the surface that represents what the land actually does out there) it tells you that there’s about 65,000 yards of cut and about 74,000 yards of fill. I just told you that I have 85,000 yards of material to bring in, that’s considered fill. That means that all of the 65,000 cubic yards of cut material would have to be stockpiled somewhere or hauled off. That’s not good, so I have to once again modify the vertical alignment of the road to even out those numbers so that the cut is actually used and doesn’t have to be stockpiled and hopefully we won’t have to actually cut as much, that would save even more money. Anyway, it’s kind of an annoying process and since I needed a break I thought I would ramble about it for a little while.