MIDH Says Used Rubber Tires in More Tomorrow are for Roadwork

Residents of More Tomorrow, in the Cayo District, were alarmed on Tuesday when they stumbled upon thousands of used tires dumped along the road to their village. Initially, it seemed like these old tires were just being discarded there. However, News Five later discovered that the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Housing had placed them there for roadwork purposes. Chief Engineer Evondale Moody explained that the road to More Tomorrow is prone to flooding, and the ministry is experimenting with using these rubber tires in road construction to address the issue.

 

Evondale Moody, Chief Engineer, MIDH

“The ministry has just over three thousand, one hundred miles of road that we have to maintain countrywide and one such road is the More Tomorrow Road which is a secondary road within the Cayo District.  That road normally is susceptible to flooding.  As you may be aware, I think a few weeks ago, there were some complaints from the school in that area about access to the village and also to the school.  And so, we had to go in and do some remedial works in terms of periodic maintenance, but that is our fourth trip to that area just in this year.  And so, what we are trying is an engineering technology called mechanical concrete whereby you utilize old tires to construct a formation basically, and you would utilize that in areas where you have areas that are susceptible to flooding or you have major consolidation.  And so, the old tires are basically set up in a grid formation, similar too what we call a geo-grid, which you would have to import; however, utilizing the old tires is beneficial to us because it also prevents erosion from happening and also acts as a confinement for the aggregates that we’re placing on the road.  Within the area that we’re doing this test, this pilot project, on the More Tomorrow Road is, as I said, usually susceptible to flooding and we thought that trying this technology it would also be environmentally friendly.  So the idea is that you place these tires in a grid formation and we infill these tires with aggregates and then compact over it.  We have done that today, for approximately five hundred meters.  We intend to try and complete at least one point six kilometers which is about a mile and we want to do that by the end of this week as a pilot project.”