Fort Collins ADA Ramp Contractors

Mid-January, ten in the morning. The ramp itself is dry, because it faces south and yesterday's sun took care of it. The landing at the bottom is a sheet of glass. All that meltwater ran downhill all afternoon, pooled on the one flat surface the standard requires, and froze solid when the temperature dropped at four. Your route measured compliant on the day it was built and it is unusable right now.

That's the version of accessibility work nobody puts in a specification. We build and rebuild accessible entrances across Fort Collins, at older buildings around Old Town where the original entries predate any of this, and at newer property along Harmony, Fossil Creek, and The Landing where the geometry is right but the drainage was an afterthought. A ramp has to pass a tape measure. It also has to work on the worst morning of the year.

Why a compliant ramp still fails in February

Think about what a ramp is. A sloped plane that collects everything landing on it and delivers all of it to one place. That place is a level landing, because the standard says the bottom has to be level, and level surfaces do not drain themselves. So the geometry that makes a ramp usable in July is the same geometry that concentrates ice in one spot in January.

Add what our winters do. This far north the freeze cycles come thick, and the daytime sun at this elevation is strong enough to melt a south-facing surface even when the air never gets above freezing. Melt, run, pool, refreeze. Twenty times a season on the same square of concrete. Where that water reaches a joint or gets under a landing, it lifts. A landing that rises a quarter inch on one corner has just changed a cross slope that had almost no room in it to begin with.

Building a ramp for the season, not just for the tape

Those numbers are the ceiling, not the goal. We build below the maximum running slope wherever the site gives us room, because a ramp right at the limit has zero tolerance left for the settlement that eventually comes. Same on cross slope. Build at the limit and one winter of movement puts you out.

Then we deal with water before it becomes ice. The landing stays in tolerance but gets pitched deliberately toward a low point so runoff leaves instead of standing. Broom finish runs across the direction of travel, which gives a shoe or a wheel something to bite. Handrail posts go deep enough that frost isn't lifting them out of a shallow pocket, and they're isolated from the slab so the two don't fight each other on every temperature swing.

Mix matters more here than almost anywhere else on a property. Four thousand PSI, entrained air right around six percent, because this surface takes chemicals, foot traffic, and dozens of freeze cycles a season. Maintenance rules go to you in writing when we finish, since the fastest way to ruin a new route is to spread the wrong thing on it in December.

Winter care that protects an accessible route, and winter care that destroys one

What we measure and document before we quote a route

• Running slope taken in short increments, not averaged across the ramp
• Cross slope at several points, including where the ramp meets each landing
• Landing dimensions at the top, the bottom, and anywhere the route turns
• Clear width between rails, checked at the narrowest point rather than the widest
• Handrail height, extensions, and whether the posts have moved
• Condition and attachment of detectable warning surfaces
• Level changes and lippage at every joint along the path of travel
• Where meltwater goes after it leaves the ramp, and where it stops