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Americans love to shop, but they are also easily irritated by inconvenience. English Paving Co. of Ridgefield, NJ, had to keep these two ideas in mind when working on a parking lot and road reconstruction project at Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, N.J. The company needed to complete the job in four days-starting on a Monday and ending on a Thursday-as to not interfere with the weekend traffic at the mall. A subcontactor striped on the fifth day. The 32,000-square-yard (288,000-square-foot) project required careful planning and round-the-clock commitment from the English Paving crews. The National Asphalt Pavement Association honored English Paving with a 2004 Quality in Construction Award for their work at the mall.

Preparing the site

If you've ever been to a large mall, you can image the challenges a paving operation faces when working in such an environment. English Paving paved the mall's interior roads at night as to not disturb the flow of traffic during the mall's business hours. During the day, they worked around the constant presence of shoppers and traffic. The English Paving crews blocked off sections of the parking lots where they were working, but even construction drums, flagged roping, and heavy equipment didn't always keep people away.

"The parking lot is in front of Macy's and there was always a lot of traffic coming through the mall while we were working," says Drew Lillis, project manager at English Paving. "People will park where they want, or try to take the shortest path from their car to the mall entrance, so we had pedestrians cutting through the lots where we were working all the time, even though we had barrels and barricades to try to stop them. Our guys on rollers or other machines always had to watch out behind them for pedestrians. We also had someone at the entrance where our trucks were coming in that would let our guys in but keep public vehicle traffic out of those areas."

English Paving dedicated much of the first two days on the job to milling. The crews used a Terex 800 for the milling, pulling up an average of two inches across the roads and the parking lot. The crews took the milled material to the asphalt plant that supplies English Paving its HMA.

English Paving had a base repair crew on site for box out repairs. Immediately after an area was milled and swept, an engineer conducted a proof roll using a loaded tandem dump truck to identify the areas that needed repair. About 1,000 square yards (9,000 square feet) of area required base repair work.