Centennial ADA Ramp Contractors

Ask whoever sits at the front desk which door people struggle with. You will get an answer immediately, and it will be more useful than most written reports, because the staff have watched it happen for years. Somebody in a chair backs down and goes around to the service door. A patient with a walker gets met at the car. A driver stopped using the ramp because the hand truck bucks at the lip.

Those workarounds are the real symptom. A ramp is not measured once and then forgotten. It is one piece of a route people travel several times a day, and the route fails as a whole. We rebuild ramps, landings, and the walks and curb transitions attached to them for offices, clinics, retail centers, churches, and associations around Centennial, most of it on property built before anybody thought in fractions of an inch per foot.

The route is a chain, and it breaks at one link

Start where somebody actually starts: the accessible stall. If that stall drains toward the aisle at a steep enough pitch, a wheelchair rolls while its user is still transferring. The access aisle beside it has to be flat and clear, and on plenty of older lots it is neither, because a curb ramp got added later and pushed the grade around.

Then the curb ramp, then the walk, then the landing, then the door. Each one has its own limits and each has to hand off cleanly to the next. A ramp built perfectly that dumps onto a walk pitching the wrong way still fails the person using it. So does a landing half an inch below a threshold, or a route that measures fine in summer and vanishes under a plow pile every January.

Older commercial frontage around Southglenn and the office property near Willow Creek gives us most of this work. The buildings are sound, the parking works, and the accessible route got retrofitted at some point by somebody solving one piece of the problem. So we usually take out more than the ramp. The failure often sits in the fifteen feet on either side of a ramp that measures fine.

The workarounds people invent, and what each one is telling you

What we measure before anybody quotes a ramp

• Running slope down the full length of the ramp, not just at the middle
• Cross slope at several points, since one bad reading is enough to fail
• Landing size and slope in both directions, top and bottom
• Flare slopes where pedestrians can cross them
• Vertical change at the gutter, the walk joint, and the threshold
• Condition and setback of the detectable warning surface
• Where snow gets pushed and where roof runoff lands on the route

Winter is when a ramp really gets graded

Anything with a slope on it collects the worst of Front Range winter. Meltwater runs down a ramp all afternoon, sheets across the landing, and freezes right where somebody has to stop and reach for a handle. That happens dozens of times between November and March at this elevation, which is why we treat a ramp as a drainage detail first and a slope detail second. Water needs a direction to go that is not across the path of travel.

Deicer is the second half of it. Chloride products get shoveled onto ramps heavier than anywhere else because the liability is obvious, and they eat the surface of concrete that has not reached age. On new work we ask for sand only through the first winter, and after that we would rather see a heated mat or aggressive shoveling than a bucket of magnesium chloride.

Ramp work runs well from April into October, and we place these pours early in the day through storm season, because rain on a surface still being finished ruins both the texture people grip and the bedding under the warning panels. We do build ramps in winter, since accessibility deadlines do not move for weather, using heated mix water, accelerator, and blankets. Frozen subgrade stops us cold.