When Franklin County Commissioner Larkin Jumper took office in 2015, he set a personal goal to learn all he could about road and bridge maintenance.
“My background was financial, not construction,” Jumper explained. “I determined which Commissioners had the better roads, and then I sought their advice. I then developed both an annual and a multiyear work plan to rebuild our precinct roads.”
Our February issue will include a detailed description of the Franklin County Road 4105 project. Below please find details on an earlier project.
Franklin County Road 2025
In June 2020, Franklin County Commissioner Larkin Jumper managed a road reconstruction project on Franklin County Road NE 2025. This road has several homes on one end, but the majority of the road is only utilized by ranchers and oil field workers. As a result, much of the road had been neglected for many years and had become almost impassable in certain locations which incurred repeated flooding. Road repairs costing upwards of $1,000 usually only lasted until the next flooding occurred.
Jumper and his three employees removed the single metal culvert, 24 inches by 24 feet, and replaced it with four plastic culverts, 30 inches by 24 feet, along with metal headwalls on both the inlet and outlet ends of each culvert. The installation of the new culverts increased the flow capacity to over six times of the original culvert.
A retaining wall was then constructed using guardrails received from TxDOT’s surplus materials program. The retaining wall varied from 1 foot tall to 3 feet tall and was over 200 feet in length.
After completion of the retaining wall, a mixture of fly ash and RAP received from TxDOT was bladed, packed, and watered to create a concrete-like road base. After allowing the road base to cure, the project site was covered with two layers of chip seal material. The entire project was completed in six workdays at an estimated cost of $4,500 for the culverts, fly ash, metal for the headwalls, and chip seal materials. The estimated life of this project is 30 or more years because of use of the plastic culverts and the headwalls.
Since the completion of this project, the site has incurred multiple high-water instances with no flooding or road and culvert damage.
Two other NE 2025 locations totaling approximately 700 feet having similar flooding issues were also repaired in a similar manner and have incurred only very minor flooding damages after the improvements were completed.