Hacker News Reader

I am from the Denver region and from personal experience I know the area has a lot of Bentonite clays [0] which can expand as water is absorbed and contract as it dries. My neighborhood was built on land with a lot of this clay and our streets are wavy and our driveways are cracked to hell. I imagine they deal with similar issues at DIA.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite

View on HN

My neighborhood is the same. The ground and site prep out at DIA the Civil Engineer friend told me about took things like that into account.

I for one have had much of the cement replaced around my house (some more than once) and when I had the driveway redone, explicitly asked them to mitigate against the clay with whatever they had that made sense. I forget what all they had extra in the proposal that I approved (it was 10+ yrs ago) but my new driveway isn't having any issue while some neighbor's new ones are already cracked again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com