Many years ago, I was a newly assigned Assistant Area Engineer of the Fort Worth District for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) in Johnson County, Texas. When I took the assignment, the state roads in the county were being overstrained by a massive boom of activity in the Barnett Shale. The non-stabilized farm roads could not handle the massive influx of traffic with the myriad of heavy oil field vehicles. The roads were failing at an unprecedented rate. The budget for patching the roads doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled. Emergency crews from other counties were brought in to patch some areas and completely rebuild other areas.It was an unsustainable situation, and my assignment was to put together a plan to have emergency funds directed to rebuild these roads using construction contracts. Based on advice from the district, full-depth reclamation (FDR) with cement was selected as a faster, stronger, and more economical method to rebuild the overwhelmed roadway network.
