Driving up to the Pinehurst Country Club in Denver, the first thing you notice is the bright whiteness of the concrete parking lots—exactly what I was there to learn about! Only recently completed, all of Pinehurst’s old black and degraded asphalt parking lots and access roads have been overlaid with 3 inches of concrete.
To encourage more of this sort of work--potentially a huge market for concrete--a group of local concrete-related associations and suppliers sponsored a breakfast to explain to local contractors, ready-mix producers, and owners why and how this overlay was accomplished, starting with convincing the club’s board that paying a little extra now would save more than a million dollars over the next 20 years in asphalt maintenance. John Hanson with the National Ready-Mixed Concrete Association says that concrete pavements have the maintenance built in.
Integral to the success of this project was the National Concrete Pavement Technology Center’s new Guide to Concrete Overlays of Asphalt Parking Lots, which provides design and construction details. Also important to this project was NRMCA's Design Assistance Program led by Hanson and Amanda Hult that provides free consulting on parking lots.
The overlay was placed by Leonard Velasquez’s SLV Quality Concrete. He noted that this was his first experience with what used to be called "whitetopping." That term is no longer used, at least not by NRMCA and the American Concrete Pavement Association--now it's simply called a concrete overlay.Velasquez also commented that he was surprised at the bond that develops between the new concrete and the old asphalt--if it's clean and dry, he says, it really does stick.
Pinehurst’s leaders and members (some of whom are in the concrete industry) are thrilled with the results, feeling that the literal "curb appeal" of the parking lots will attract new members and keep the current members coming back.
