After massive flooding hit Missouri in 2017, the hillsides along several stretches of Highway 5 sloughed down onto the road. When FEMA sought to shore up one such slope outside Camdenton, a city of 4,000 in the central part of the state, the steep task fell to Geromini Concrete (GC) Paving LLC in the nearby town of Montreal.
The firm, owned by Jamie Geromini, has carved out a niche in the concrete industry by doing a “bit of everything besides asphalt,” she said, but the slide repair proved an uphill climb—literally. Much of the work took place on a 45-degree embankment along the highway as the hill’s eroded soil was swapped out for sturdier rock.
“It was basically removing 22,000 cu yd of dirt and soils that were bad and replacing them with 22,000 cu yd of rockfill up these slopes,” superintendent Nate Geromini explained. “And there was no access above, so everything had to be taken and moved up the hill.”
The solution: Nate formed a “chain” of machines lining the hill from top to bottom. With dump trucks waiting beside the still-active highway, a fleet of Doosan crawler excavators moved dirt down the slope. A reverse process later helped move materials uphill.
“You have a machine down at the bottom, moving it out of the dump trucks up to the other machine then up to the other machine,” Nate explained. “Then you just work your way across the hill, and you build your pad that you’re on as you go.”
