Project management
Koss Construction performed the second designed perpetual pavement project on US-69, containing five lifts of asphalt totaling 14 ¼ inches.
Koss Construction Builds Perpetual Pavements in Oklahoma T
The goal of every pavement project is to build a high-quality roadway that will offer a smooth, safe ride for as long as possible. The concept of a perpetual pavement puts a hard number on that goal: 50 years. According to the Asphalt Pavement Alliance (APA), a perpetual pavement is defined as “an asphalt pavement designed and built to last longer than 50 years without requiring major structural rehabilitation or reconstruction, and needing only periodic surface renewal in response to distresses confined to the top of the pavement.” To construct a road built to last half of a century—or longer—the Oklahoma Department of Transportation awarded the winning bid to Koss Construction, Tope-
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ka, Kansas, for the state’s second perpetual pavement project. The $24.5 million would utilize the perpetual pavement concept on a 5-mile section of US-69 south of Eufaula, Oklahoma. US-69 has an average daily traffic count of 16,000. As a major trucking route between Kansas City and Dallas, one third of US-69’s ADT is truck traffic.
Koss Construction was founded in 1912. More than 90 percent of Koss Construction’s jobs are for government agencies, the majority of which are state DOTs. The company operates throughout the Midwest, in Arkansas, eastern Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.
“Perpetual pavement is something we are very interested in, as an agency,” said ODOT Division Engineer Jamie Malmstrom. “It makes a lot of sense from a maintenance standpoint.”
PERPETUAL PAVEMENTS: A BRIEF HISTORY
Although the term “perpetual pavement” wasn’t introduced until 2000, pavement engineers have been producing long-lasting pavements since the 1960s. Many of these pavements, APA said, were the products of full-depth or deep-strength asphalt pavement designs. In fact, Oklahoma has its own history with long-lasting HMA pavements. According to a pamphlet produced for APA in the early 2000s, two sections of Interstate
