Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Fixing the highway

On Tuesday afternoon I crossed SR 114 on Melville and noticed that the pavement was being ripped up. This morning I thought I would go see how work was progressing. I was very surprised to see that the work was apparently finished. The eastbound lane was resurfaced and nothing had been done to the westbound lane.
Perhaps because the garbage trucks are loaded as they head east, the eastbound lanes were in worse shape than the westbound lanes? It seems to me to be a strange way to fix a road.

Note the bit of fall color in one of the trees.

This coming weekend will be another busy weekend. On Friday the high school has its homecoming game, and on Thursday we will enjoy the annual homecoming parade. On Saturday Main Street presents Oktoberfest, which maybe should be called Septemberfest. This year there will be no admission charge, though a donation is requested. The Meister Winds from Indianapolis will start the music with German tunes and the local band McGuffin will close out the evening. CDC Resources will have a fundraising concert at eMbers. It will feature Elvis tribute performer Kurt Lechner. The music starts at 7:00 and the doors open at 6:00. There are also food events at the Knights of Columbus and at Brushwood Methodist Church on Saturday.

Speaking of CDC Resources, I was part of a tour last week at CDC Resources that looked at the work done in their sheltered workshop. One contract that they have is with Emerson Electric in Monticello. CDC makes wooden shipping boxes that are used for ball bearings. Some of these are used in oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, so when drilling slowed or stopped after the BP spill, demand for bearings dropped and boxes were not needed.--what was happening in the Gulf was affecting people in northwest Indiana. Another contract is with Rockland Flooring west of Monon. Rockland makes floors for truck trailers, and when the machine turns out a floor that is not quite level, they use little wooden wedges to fix it. CDC produces thousands of these wedges a week. A final contract that is current is for National Gypsum. The local plant is the only National Gypsum plant that produces the tape rolls. Most of them are packed by machine, but there is one size box that the machine does not fill properly. They are filled at the CDC workshop.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pardon my vent, but it seems as if Jasper County always gets short shrift on state highway money. Just looking at the repair work on 114 seems to reinforce the evidence that we cannot get any state highway projects of any quality in this county. I am not sure where all of the gas tax we pay goes, but I would venture a guess that it is Lake or Porter counties who always seem to have nice highway...Sorry for the rant.

You do such a great job keeping us up on what is happening in the community. Keep it up.

Anonymous said...

The road is just beautiful and smooootthhhh.

Anonymous said...

As of yesterday the crews began work on the resurfacing of 114's westbound lane.