Bethany Road Overpass Repair Wraps Up Friday; Other Roadwork Begins

The Bethany Road Parkway overpasses should be reopened to weekday traffic after repaving on Friday, said a foreman on the site July 22. 

But just as those crews are leaving, Holmdel and Hazlet Townships are gearing up their long-awaited repavement project on Bethany Road, for the section between the Parkway overpass at Cresci Boulevard and Line Road at the Aberdeen border. 

"Hopefully we can get a substantial part of this work done before school opens in September," said Holmdel Township Engineer Ed Broberg of T & M Associates at the Holmdel Township Committee meeting on July 21. 

The engineer pointed out that three local schools --  St. Benedict School, St. John Vianney and Raritan Valley Elementary --- all run bus routes along the busy corridor, and that the road is a daily link for thousands of commuters between Route 35 and Route 34. He said paving would be done at night.

The Bethany Road project is a cooperative project with Hazlet Township because Holmdel owns one half of the road, and Hazlet owns the other. In late January, Holmdel learned it would receive $170,000 in a state aid to help pay for the repairs to the roadbed, curbs and sidewalks on the pockmarked road. Hazlet received $200,000 in state aid. (See the Holmdel Patch February story with photographs of the road conditions.) 

On Thursday, it was announced AMC Industries of Cliffwood, NJ came in with the lowest bid for the repair work, at $223,241 for the work on the Holmdel side, and $299,913 for the work on the Hazlet side, for a total of $523,154. The Holmdel Township Committee accepted the bid, and also voted to pay the township engineer $18,750 to compensate him for overseeing the Bethany Road Project for the township.

Meanwhile, work continues this week on the overpasses over the northbound and southbound Parkway, owned by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. The road has been closed to motorists during weekday hours while workers dig deep into the roadbed to fix a problem that is causing cracks in the surface, which the road crew calls "spalls." 

"Between the two bridges, there had to be 40 spalls," said Labor Foreman Harold Hemmings of Gardner M Bishop, a NJ-licensed contractor based in White Plains, NY. Over time, road salt distributed in the wintertime leaches into the porous cement and causes the reinforcing steel to rust, causing spalls. The rust build-up actually pushes the concrete up, which can create cracks and corrosion.

The workers have removed the asphalt overlay and jackhammered off the old concrete bed to work on the dual layer of steel reinforcements, which look like prison bars. They are laying a high performance mix of concrete that is denser than the old kind and should last 20 years, workers said. 

Tilcon Asphalt of Hamburg, NJ is scheduled to be on site on Friday to lay a new layer of blacktop, said Hemmings. 

When its done it will be " 'smooth sailing' surface" said Hemmings. 

The workers have been dealing with the torrid heat wave in recent days. Instead of working 10-12 hour days, the crews have been forced to begin at 6 a.m. and quit around 3 p.m. due to the the extreme heat, Hemmings said.