For additional information on the Edmonton road paving project:
Launch Project Spotlight

Forget the old adage; when it comes to road paving, what you can’t see can hurt you.  At the very least, it can rattle your teeth and give you a headache.

When drivers and pedestrians look at a street paved with asphalt, all they see is the asphalt.  But below the surface is a base layer of concrete or granular material.  As the base layer goes, so goes the road surface.  If it breaks up or shifts, so does the asphalt – not all pot holes are created in cold weather through repeated cycles of freezing and thawing.  On the other hand, a road base that retains its integrity can go a long way toward preserving a smooth road surface for many years.

Traditionally, preparing a high quality concrete road base has been a labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive process.  Conventional Class B concrete must be placed by hand, screeded, floated and then finished by hand.  Depending upon the length of the roadbed, it may be necessary to repeat these tasks several times.

When the City of Edmonton, Alberta was preparing to convert 164 meters (537 feet) of median strip into turning lanes, it originally contemplated using conventional Class B concrete for the road base.  Had they done so, it would have required at minimum a 10-man crew and it would have taken in excess of two full days to complete the job.

Instead, the city accepted the recommendation of its contractor, Wells Construction, and approved the use of Lafarge’s Agilia® -- a new generation of self-compacting, self-placing ready-mix concrete.  Familiar with the properties of Agilia from having used it on another project, the contractor knew that it moves into place under its own weight and is resistant to defects from segregation and bleeding.  Additionally, Agilia’s demonstrably superior flexural strength is ideal for a project such as a road bed in an industrial area that must endure the stresses of high-volume semi-trailer traffic.

Instead of a 10-person crew, the contractor was able to complete the job with four men using Agilia.  Instead of upwards of two working days, the whole job was poured in less than one-half day.  To top things off (as it were), the Agilia was poured on a wet day – a day when the pouring of conventional concrete would not even have been allowed.

The bottom line: the City of Edmonton got the best possible material to ensure a long-lasting road surface and it was able to open the new traffic lanes sooner.  Although Agilia is a premium product that can cost more than conventional concrete, the fact that less than half as many men completed the same task in a quarter of the time resulted in substantial net savings.  “The savings was probably twice or three times the incremental cost of Agilia when compared with conventional concrete,” explains Piero Nanfara, project manager at Lafarge’s Edmonton Concrete location.

“Everyone was happy,” Nanfara says.  “The contractor was happy because he had previously seen how Agilia performs.  The crew was happy because they were able to place Agilia off a chute instead of having to bend over and screed it.  And the city was happy because they got a good value for their taxpayers’ money.  And, the city has now included Agilia in their project specification list.  In the future, selecting Agilia for municipal projects will be a no-brainer.”