Stone from New York quarries is used to create concrete on the project’s floating batch plants. Each plant produces an average of 125 cubic yards of concrete per hour.
If all the concrete used to build the New NY Bridge was used to build a typical sidewalk, the path would extend approximately 1,500 miles from the project site to Key West, Florida. All that concrete is being made with New York sand and stone, mined from quarries across the state.
Among the leading suppliers of stone for the project is Tilcon New York, which operates quarries and other construction facilities across the state. Tilcon’s Clinton Point facility in New Hamburg delivers immense quantities of crushed stone on a regular basis. Located just north of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, the plant’s river access and the close proximity enable the stone to be safely and efficiently barged to the project.
Before being loaded onto barges, the material is carefully processed to precise specifications. The stone is measured in terms of angularity (shape), gradation (size), weight, chemical reactivity and moisture content before being loaded and shipped. Dimensions as minute as a fraction of an inch are meticulously maintained through a sifting process to ensure the highest quality concrete mixtures.
The stone as well as sand, cement, water and slag (a recycled product of metal manufacturing that improves the durability of concrete) are brought to the project site, where they are mixed into concrete by the project’s two floating batch plants. Quality control specialists watch over the operation, ensuring the materials are mixed correctly and to the right proportions.
The enormous amounts of stone are moved to the project site in precise alignment with construction operations. Overseeing the complex coordination is Wayne Dabrowski, the project’s batch plants coordinator, who helped design and assemble the batch plants prior to their arrival in July.
“It’s on the batch plant team to make sure that we have all stone and other constituent materials of concrete available in proper quantities and ready to be mixed,” Dabrowski explained. “At the same time, it’s really impractical to offload, store and then reload large quantities of stone, sand and aggregate. By working closely with quality suppliers like Tilcon, we’re hitting that not-too-much, not-too-little sweet spot of supply, which is ensuring excellent production.”
With construction moving in high gear, stone from the empire state is making the New NY Bridge rock solid.
