This summer’s road trip vacation involved lots of long waits on crowded highways and interstates. And while the waiting was not also easy to handle, it did give your husband time to tell your teenage sons most of what he knew about the road construction process. Before he graduated from college and finished his physical therapy degree, your husband spent his summers working on road crews with his uncle. So while other vacationers may have been bored as they passed one construction worker or site after another, you and your boys learned about trench boxes and other types of shoring for excavation. In fact, by the end of the trip you were all able to identify the various kinds of trench boxes that your husband had told you about, and while your sons hoped that they never had to work the long hours in the son that their father had, they did understand why these workers earned their high wages. Even thought the trench box shields provided protection from cave ins and provided support, the work was still difficult and hot.
Temporary Shoring Methods Help Road Construction Projects Remain Safe and Get Completed on Time
Unless you have a family member in the road or bridge construction industry, you likely do not understand the amount of preparation that goes into any kind of road or bridge construction project. And while we all drive on these roads and bridges every day, unless we are stuck in traffic along a major construction project, we likely do not know that it is safety measures like trench boxes and other shoring methods that allow projects to be completed on time.
Consider some of these statistics about the need for new roads and bridges in this country and the trench boxes and other shoring methods that are used in these construction projects:
- 200 million trips are taken daily across deficient bridges in the nation?s 102 largest metropolitan regions.
- In fact, 11% of the nation?s bridges are rated as structurally deficient, while the average age of the nation?s 607,380 bridges is currently 42 years.
- In order to eliminate the nation?s bridge deficient backlog by the year 2028, we would need to invest $20.5 billion a year, according to Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) estimates. Unfortunately, only $12.8 billion is currently being spent a year.
- Highway and road construction put in place in the U.S. is projected to grow to over $99.4 billion by 2020. Currently, the public sector spent almost $90 billion on highway construction.
- Timber and aluminum hydraulic are the two basic types of shoring.
- Simple and multiple are the two basic types of benching. Which one is used is determined by the the type of soil and the horizontal to vertical ratio of the benched side.
