Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Street Repair

Coming from Minnesota, I am no stranger to road work. In fact, a common saying there says that we have two seasons.....winter and road repair. At times, I believed it too!

And here on Isla, it seems like the streets are constantly being torn up and repaired some how. Some of them over and over and over and over again.

So it was no surprise to me to see that Merida was going through the same thing. Most of the downtown streets are being torn up and redone. Since the streets downtown are one ways, it has caused some major rerouting problems. But the ones that have been completed and have reopened are really nice. They have made the sidewalks wider, which also makes them safer.

I stopped one day and watched them working for awhile. (glad it was not me in that hot sun!)

After the street has been torn up and the forms set, they start with a big, noisy cement mixer. One crew pours and levels.



The next crew follows behind finishing the surface.





This guy then throws what looks to be lime on the fresh(ish) cement and trowels it in.






Then comes the guy with the fun job. He gets to use the forms that stamp the image into the cement.






And finally, more noise. This guy uses this jack hammer device as a finishing touch. I would have thought that it would mess up the pattern, but it doesn't.






It was an interesting, well organized and run operation to watch. It would be good for some of the road engineers here on the island to go take a look at how things could and should be done.

5 comments:

Ann said...

Looks a lot more efficient than the work on the Isla roads--hope downtown is done by the time we make it back in January!

Life's a Beach! said...

Maybe the road builders from Arizona should fly down and take notes. The big intersection close to our neighborhood has been torn up since January. And no one's working on it. Unfortunately, every season is road construction in Arizona!

Anonymous said...

We witnessed much of the road construction on Isla. It looks great but I could never figure out why they didn't put in drains. When it rains Hidalgo still floods.

Anonymous said...

In all fairness, the drainage problem on Isla is a whole lot different than in Merida.

I would suspect that there are a whole range of problems that a drier environment doesn't have to deal with.

O Robert

lisa said...

What I like is that they sometimes do repairs on roads that don't need it and don't do repairs on ones that do need it!