ELLSWORTH AIR FORCE BASE, S.D. -- In pursuit of completing the new Ellsworth runway in preparation for the incoming B-21 Raider, the 28th Civil Engineer Squadron constructed a temporary haul road through land that connects South Gate Road with Country Road.
This new road, spanning three-quarters of a mile, will allow construction vehicles and machinery to move materials more efficiently and reduce damage on nearby residential roads.
"The project was developed to alleviate construction traffic in the community but also primarily provides our runway contractor exclusive access to the job site via this haul road. Having this 24/7 contractor access greatly reduces the schedule risk on the $129.5M project," stated Colby Larson, 28th CES engineering flight chief.
The 28th CES met with community leaders, city engineers and long-range planners, Pennington County and the highway superintendent, South Dakota Ellsworth Development Authority, South Dakota Department of Transportation, and many more groups to start construction. They also attended a town hall with Box Elder, South Dakota.
The haul road construction allowed the airmen on Ellsworth to obtain large-scale project experience on their home base, which they usually only get on deployments.
This haul road project "was a chance for us to get out of our comfort zone and to put it out there for other engineers to look at and say, 'Someone else did it, we can do it too,'" explained Larson.
Larson's experience as an active-duty Army CE officer, and now a guardsman, allowed him to use his time in the field, specifically during his deployments, to manage this larger-scale project most effectively.
Surveyors and 28th CES airmen conducted concurrent training by examining the property and reflecting on the design plan that a contractor created to compare with what they would have designed.
"These comparisons helped train airmen in reading construction drawings and plans and how to interpret them," said Larson.
Senior Airman Avery Vogel, 28th CES execution support technician, led the preparation to construct the road.
A team of six engineer assistants entered the construction drawings' data into their geographic information system. Once confirmed locationally accurate, they plugged more information into a survey controller, which directs the airmen with global positioning system equipment. The GPS survey equipment was necessary to stake out the road accurately. Using a masonry bit, they drilled through the frozen earth, hammered in the wooden stakes to indicate the center line, and planted flags at the edges.
Once the mapping was completed, the aptly named "dirtboyz" started constructing the road by removing all the grass from the top layer.
This title, "dirtboyz," refers to the section within the U.S. Air Force CE and has been passed down through generations. It emphasizes the boys' sole job of working with dirt.
With help from the Army National Guard in Sturgis, SD, the team used one of their sheep foot rollers to compact the asphalt millings. To construct the road, recycled material was used from different base jobs stockpiled over the past 40 years.
The "dirtboyz" completed the haul road using 16 hours out of their daily 24-hour operations and turned it over to the runway contractor within just over a month.
"The scope is so much different between here and deployment. Your normal state-side jobs are more of a maintenance and repair aspect. Whereas when you deploy and everything else, you [start] from the bare base. Your structure is a lot different," explained Kreutzer, the foreman of the horizontal section.
"I'm glad we, as CE, took this on in-house and did this project. It just shows that with our capabilities, we can not only do it overseas, but we can do it here and provide for large military construction projects and programs in the same way. I think it's a good testbed to see how we can move this forward and hopefully use it at other times in the future here to help out with all the bed-down construction." said Larson.