Ask the common man to describe a cavern and you'd likely be regaled with the stuff of discovery tucked into a picturesque mountainous landscape. But ask a construction contractor astride Prairie County, Ark.'s I-40 in early 2014 for the same, and you would get a very different story. "Many of the concrete panels here were tilted, and there were actual caverns [void areas] underneath them. Some were rocking back and forth a few inches as traffic passed over them," Kelly Moore, asphalt division manager for Koss Construction, told Roads & Bridges. Koss was the primary contractor for the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department (AHTD) on the I-40 project. "This is a very busy stretch of I-40, a heavily traveled coast-to-coast road, as well as being the main thoroughfare from Little Rock to Memphis. It was extremely faulted and rough."
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