Ridgewood Grade

Prior to starting HEBERLY ENGINEERING P.C., Adam Heberly worked with various DOT’s – including FHWA, ODOT and CALTRANS. The first DOT he worked for was Caltrans and one of the first projects he worked on, in the year 2000, was the Ridgewood Grade Project. This particular project inspired him to switch directions, from studying Mechanical Engineering to Civil Engineering.

The Ridgewood Grade project consisted of realigning Hwy 101, by cutting a through-cut on geologically challenging soils and constructing huge stabilization trenches on the fill slope side of the large roadway realignment project. The cut and fills amounted to approximately 300,000 cubic yards. The project also consisted of realigning two large drainages and jacking / mining 6ft diameter reinforced concrete pipes under Hwy 101, which had high volumes of traffic. A lightweight poly-styrene fill was placed, as well as upgrading all the project drainage (multiple culverts – up to 20’ deep) and paving. Hwy 101 has high traffic loads, which provided him an opportunity to be involved with traffic staging plans.

During the course of the project, the geotechnically challenging soils “Blue Goo”, which is coastal heavy clay, became an issue. The throughcut that was 26 meter wide started to hump and in the course of days was reduced to 25 meters wide. Through much coordination with the Geotechnical Engineers and many slope indicator tests, the solution was to place a very large rock buttress to pinch and slow down the very shallow slip plain that was 20’ below subgrade. As seen in the photos we called the buttress “Rip-Rap Ranch”.