Asphalt plant on probation when broken highway was built

An asphalt plant owned by a Fort Wayne construction company was placed on probation by the Indiana Department of Transportation while the company was building a state road the agency later found to be crumbling years earlier than it should have.

INDOT investigators found that the Brooks Construction asphalt plant was mixing blacktop that did not always meet agency specifications. The plant was one of two Brooks-owned plants the agency placed on probation in April 2011. Asphalt from those two plants had been used in at least two other INDOT road projects, from 2008 to 2010, parts of which had to be repaved, said INDOT spokesman Will Wingfield.

One of the plants, in Logansport, provided the asphalt for a 3-mile stretch of Ind. 25 in Cass County for which INDOT last week demanded a $5 million refund or repaving for alleged shoddy construction. INDOT officials said that portion of the Hoosier Heartland Highway began cracking and crumbling a year after it was paved in 2012 because the asphalt did not have enough sticky, oil-based binder to hold it together. The road was supposed to last 20 years.

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Ronald P. Walker, INDOT's manager of materials management, said in a letter to Brooks Construction dated March 1, 2011, that investigators found "an inability for either plant to produce consistent mixture" of asphalt, which includes stones and the binder.

The asphalt plant was put on probation for a year, and the operators had to submit asphalt samples from the plants to INDOT each month.

The disclosure, provided by INDOT to The Indianapolis Star, comes as a deadline looms Friday for Brooks to answer INDOT's refund demand. The $5.15 million INDOT is seeking was the cost of the asphalt.

At the time the plants were placed on probation, Brooks Construction was in the middle of the $16 million Ind. 25 rebuilding, also known as the Hoosier Heartland project, using asphalt from the Logansport plant, Wingfield said. Although the plant was under increased scrutiny, he said, its violations were not serious enough to demand that it cease operations.

INDOT took 72 samples of the asphalt for testing as it came off dump trucks at the Ind. 25 construction site and regularly checked Brooks' asphalt "mix designs," Wingfield and INDOT Deputy Commissioner Robert Tally said.

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The mixtures the company had provided looked fine on paper, and the sophisticated laboratory tests on the asphalt itself did not reveal the flaws until the project was complete, Wingfield said.

Tally said the lab tests showed that the concentration of binder was much lower than what it should have been and that's why the Hoosier Heartland deteriorated.

Brooks Construction Executive Vice President John Brooks disputed INDOT's characterization of the testing.

He said not only was the company paid in full, but INDOT gave it an $18,000 bonus "for an asphalt mix that exceeded expectations."

Brooks said INDOT closely examined the company's records throughout the process.

"We provided INDOT hundreds of pages of data detailing the consistency of our mix," Brooks said in a written statement. "INDOT stopped seeking the additional information at roughly the midpoint of the SR 25 project. In addition, INDOT conducted 72 tests on our asphalt at the time of SR 25 and all were approved. We complied with all INDOT specifications."

Wingfield said the asphalt plants were "portable" plants that companies use when their permanent facilities aren't close enough to a job site to get hot blacktop there. He said only the Logansport plant was used for Ind. 25. He did not know immediately where the other plant was.

The two plants provided asphalt for several projects, he said, but he did not know how many.

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INDOT is investigating 188 roads built by 44 contractors that might have been made with faulty asphalt and could degrade earlier than scheduled. Tally said there was no timetable for when the investigation would be complete.

Brooks is the first company from which INDOT has demanded a refund. A spokesman for Brooks would not indicate whether the company would challenge the demand for the refund or comply.

Call Star reporter John Tuohy at (317) 444-6418. Follow him on Twitter: @john_tuohy.