Transportation – Passaic County, New Jersey 

The New Jersey Department of Transportation is currently undergoing the Contract B construction phase of a reconstruction project in Passaic County, NJ.

The project is a result of improvement actions to reconcile existing operational and safety issues. Routes 3 and 46 corridors have been prone to accidents and chronic traffic and are being addressed through interchange and widening reconstruction to accommodate lane additions.

More Lanes. More Noise.

The widening and interchange reconfiguration will mean more traffic travelling at a faster speed, which is the overall goal of the project: to alleviate the bottle neck through the county. It will, however, result an increase in noise levels as a result.

Noise modeling and analysis was completed by Paul Carpenter Associates. It was determined that the total length of noise wall required for the project will be upwards of 44,000 square feet of wall when complete.

Our Custom-finished absorptive Durisol panels, with some stretches of the wall a double-sided absorptive panel, will help maintain noise mitigation quality throughout.

Much of the wall was designed as a ground-mounted system with bottom integrated retaining panel. Portions of the noise wall will also be mounted direct to the retaining wall where the site has extended beyond the flat ground and earth retaining is a requirement.

The Durisol Standard

You would never know that the project was entirely pre-designed before Durisol became involved.

While uncommon in New Jersey, this is now our second NJDOT absorptive noise wall project in just over a decade due to the standard noise wall design for posts and panels. This design originally called for a standard precast concrete wall with an absorptive facing applied.

By being involved early-on, our team was able to get an absorptive wall accepted by the DOT as a proprietary product in advance of this project bidding. Durisol was able to show the value of our NB15 panel over the standard specified based on cost-effectiveness alone.

A difficult specification to meet, the NRC spec called for 0.85 overall and 0.5 at 250hz. This last spec was not easy to meet, but our NB15 panels were tested with results of 0.53. Additionally, our noise walls also met the other testing requirements such as freeze-thaw, salt-resistance, burn-resistance, and weathering.