Case study · Infrastructure
In Città di Castello the weather-warning panels were installed at the roadside while cars kept driving past: no digging in the verge, no concrete to wait for, and the ground as it was when the work was done.
A sign post looks structurally trivial, and it is not: it takes wind on the panel, it takes traffic vibration, and it stands up only thanks to what is underneath. Until now standard practice was a concrete footing, which means digging at the edge of the carriageway; today that footing can be a T-Block ground screw, screwed in with no digging and no pouring.
Here the panels are warning signs — yellow, orange and red alert — on a road open to traffic on the outskirts of Città di Castello. The digging has to be done in the roadside strip, the site shares space with the cars, and in February the ground is what it is.
At the roadside, digging is the costly and risky part: it opens up the verge, requires signage and lane restrictions, and means running into whatever runs underneath. Then comes pouring, waiting for the concrete to cure and finally reinstating.
With screw installation there is no digging. The machine drives the screw at the planned point and the ground around it stays closed: no spoil to take away, no reinstatement to do afterwards.
Installation was done with a mini excavator and hydraulic drive head: a machine that fits in the grass strip without encroaching on the carriageway and without needing a storage area for aggregates and concrete.
Each point is independent of the others, so the work proceeds post by post and the road stays open the whole time.
Once installed, all you see of the foundation system is the head: the foot of the post fitted into the connection, flush with the ground. No concrete collar sticking out, nothing to finish off.
If a post has to be moved — for a traffic change, a widening, a reshaped roundabout — it is unscrewed and repositioned. It is the same reason this solution works well on temporary signage sites.
Vertical signage, gantries, variable message signs and billboards come in large numbers with thin margins: what decides the cost is not the post, it is the work site around it. Removing the digging and the concrete changes the scale of the job, not a detail.
Send us the project, the type of ground and the loads: we reply with the anchoring layout and the right T-Block® models. If your case is like one of these, we will tell you — and if it is not, we will tell you that too.
