Vecellio & Grogan Carves Out Mountainside for U.S. 221 Job

Mon February 04, 2002
Giles Lambertson

Department of Transportation engineers decided Cut 4 on a U.S. 221 four-laning project in western North Carolina wasn’t as laid back as they would like, so a Vecellio & Grogan (V&G) construction crew redesigned how it would slice away the mountainside.

V&G workers moved farther west at the peak of the ridge. They started a cut that lets a slope descend at a more stable 1.25-to-1 ratio toward the highway 250 ft. (75 m) below.

But the extra excavation meant more waste material, so V&G had to find more waste pit area to accommodate the extra yardage.

The property owner at the top of the cut offered a deal: If the contractor would cut away an extra 50 ft. (15 m) of mountaintop and leave the area level, he would provide the needed waste area. Deal.

In late July, one year into the three-year project, a future home site at the top of the cut has a towering view of peaks and valleys a short eagle’s flight from the Blue Ridge Parkway. And V&G has another waste pit.

“Basically, it’s a hollow that we’re filling up for the property owner,” said Kay Vance, Vecellio’s project engineer and chief surveyor on the $16.2-million job. “We’ve been fortunate. We’ve been able to get waste areas on site.”

The 2.4-million-cu.-yd. (1.8 million cu m) job requires four waste pits, ranging downward in volume from 500,000 million cu. yds. (380,000 cu m). To fill and shape the pits, the company has a Caterpillar 992D wheel loader and a Cat 992C hi-trak dozer working the mountaintop.

Finding suitable waste sites was a plus, Vance said, but the additional excavation required on two cuts also was a headache.

“The biggest problem has probably been that we’ve had this overrun of yardage,” Vance said as he bumped his pickup along the rising roadway carved from the hillside for rock-hauling trucks. “We found ourselves trying to acquire three different waste areas that we didn’t think we would need when we started. That’s been the biggest hurdle.”

The original contract estimate was for removal of nearly 910,000 cu. yds. (700,000 cu m) at Cut 4 alone, before the extra excavation was ordered.

The contract was let in April of last year and calls for widening U.S. 221 to four lanes plus a broad median for nearly 4 mi. (6.4 km). The only structures on the route are culverts.

The widened roadway is transitional. It connects four lanes on the edge of Marion, NC, with two lanes on the north end — which climb quickly toward winding, tree-overhung mountain roads that skirt the edge of the historic Blue Ridge.

Six detours also will be built to keep highway traffic moving and out of harm’s way during construction.

The project’s price tag will be larger than originally contracted, yet the job is expected to be finished ahead of the scheduled completion date of June 2003.

“We had a real good winter,” noted A.D. Ollis, project superintendent. The native of neighboring Avery County knows something about the potential difficulty of winter in the area. “What winter we had didn’t hurt us that bad.”

Crews also worked night shifts during part of the project Ollis said. “It worked well. We had a real good nighttime crew that stayed on top of everything.”

Progress in winter and spring was helped by the fact that most of the work was on rock. Winter snow and spring rain don’t soften granite so that it becomes a quagmire under the pounding of tires and tracks. In fact, nothing short of blasting leaves much of an impression on the rock.

V&G has its own blasting crew headed by Daniel Luker, whom Vance characterized as “one of the best powder men in North Carolina.”

On Cut 4, the top 30 ft. (9 m) of soil was easily skimmed away. Bringing down the rest of the mountain face has meant repeated shooting of explosives to shatter the underlying granite.

In July, the explosive work was down to within a tier or two of roadbed elevation, with just a mound of earth left as a safety barrier separating the blasting from the highway.

Three Ingersoll-Rand 490 drill units were sinking shafts 15 to 20 ft. (4.6 to 6 cm) deep. Four 6-in. (15 cm) holes were being spaced 8 ft. (2.4 m) apart by the drill operators — an 8-by-8 pattern that was repeated along the length of the shooting plane.

Because the granite at that level is “seamy,” Vance said the smaller diameter hole and a powder factor of .074 lbs. (.034 kg) per ft. was found to be sufficient to loosen the rock.

“We’re getting the breakage needed using a low force,” he said, which was not the case higher up the slope.

The broken rock is hauled away by a small fleet of Caterpillar 777 dump trucks, which can carry 65 cu. yds. (50 cu m) of material, but aren’t filled to capacity on this job. The trucks are methodically loaded from a 12-cu.-yd. (15 cu m) bucket on the working end of a Cat 5110 excavator.

V&G engineers originally planned to load the loosened rock using the Cat 992D, but instead opted for the 5110.

Nearly all equipment on site is company-owned, and three quarters of it is Caterpillar. A Komatsu 400 excavator and Kenworth water trucks were seen on the July visit. A Hitachi 1100 excavator worked rock rubble on the next cut north from Cut 4.

Where the ridges widen to more comfortably accommodate the highway and an adjacent CSX railroad track, a Cat 14A motorgrader was smoothing soil. A Cat 825 was compacting fill. Cat D6, D8 and D9 dozers work the project and a Cat 330B excavator smooths the surface of a slope in advance of seeding. And as work shifts from carving new faces on mountainsides to actually building roadbeds, Caterpillar 631 scrapers will arrive to speed the work.

A couple of the machines will come from the Beckley, WV, headquarters equipment yard, Vance said. Two more will be transferred from another V&G job in Wilkes County, also in the western part of the state.

The Wilkes County job is 6 mi. (9.5 km) of realignment of U.S. 421, a project that includes six bridges. The $22-million contract on that job calls for completion later this year.

Vecellio & Grogan is one division of The Vecellio Group, which dates from 1936. It is principally involved in projects in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions of the United States.

V&G got its start in coal mine development and reclamation and has moved into site preparation and heavy and highway construction projects.

Other divisions include Pavex Corp., a paving and asphalt contractor; Ranger Construction, also involved in road-building and site work; Ranger Golf, which builds and remodels golf courses across the country; White Rock Quarries, a Florida aggregate company; and the holding corporation, Vecellio Contracting Corp. CEG

This story also appears on Construction Equipment Guide.