I Was Thinking.. A Construction Conundrum

For the last couple of years, Kasson has been the center point of road construction. Last year a six-block area was closed all summer as new water and sewer lines were laid beneath a wider and redesigned Mantorville Ave.
This spring a couple new segments are also undergoing a total revamp. The old section of road was removed, and plans are underway for Kasson to be the first city in Dodge County with three roundabouts. And as long as they are doing that, of course it makes sense to replace the old sewer and water lines. So, for the second year, getting around Kasson or even getting to Mantorville has created new traffic challenges.
One business in particular has been front and center for all the construction activity. The Country Pleasures Café is right in the middle of the action. You can’t reach the café by car from the north or the south but can come in through the alley. You could also park on either Main or 1st Street and walk down the sidewalk to the entrance. At least you could until earlier this week.
Being a big kid at heart, I’ve always been fascinated by big construction machinery. Bulldozers, earth movers, graders, and those big excavators seem to move dirt with ease. So, it is not surprising on more than one occasion, I’ve stopped to watch the workers and their machines in what I hope is progress. But let’s get back to Country Pleasures.
When roads get torn up, so do gas and water lines, and maybe even power lines. There are a lot of things under our roads we aren’t aware of. So, if you happen to be at the doorstep of the construction process, and water, gas, or electricity needs to be shut off, you get affected.
One day last week I went again to investigate the headway with the work, I was a bit shocked. The area in front of Country Pleasures that just a few days earlier had looked like it was almost ready for a layer of blacktop, now resembled a gapping cavernous pit. Sitting on a huge pile of dirt was the crawler excavator that had created the massive depression. But the hole wasn’t the only inconvenience for the café. In digging the hole, the entire sidewalk in front of the café had disappeared. It made for one very big first step if you came out the entrance.
My construction experience has been limited to a little concrete repair. The deepest holes I’ve ever dug was for the footings for my deck. Therefore, I really don’t understand all the nuances of building roundabouts, installing new sewer and water lines, or creating a new road. But. I do have a lot of questions.
When I was perusing the latest road cavern, I observed the excavator operator sitting on the tracks of his machine admiring his new creation. Someone had used a very long ladder to descend to the bottom of the pit while eight others in bright yellow vests observed from the rim. It appeared I wasn’t the only one who showed great interest in what was at the bottom of the hole or why it had been dug, again.
From the untrained eye, street construction seems to require an awful lot of digging, hauling and refilling. Numerous deep holes have been dug at the corner of Main and Hwy. 57. A small mountain of dirt is created and at the top, like a king on the mountain, sits the excavator ready to fill dump trucks to haul it away. But when you make a big hole, it doesn’t work for a road, so you need to truck in a whole lot of fill again and the cycle seems to continue.
One day a section seems to be near completion and a couple of days later a new hole has reappeared. I’m sure there are some legitimate reasons for all the digging and refilling continuum, but to the many sidewalk engineers it is a construction puzzle. While it may take a civil engineer to understand all the work that continues, no one seems to be able to answer the really big question. When will it be done?
Did You Ever Wonder? — Why is it called a building when it is already built?
Photo: I was thinking Ron Albright