Concrete cutting in Pomona, CA - straight edges and the slurry picked up

Most calls start with something that has to go through the concrete or come out of it, like a trench across the garage floor for a plumber, a new door in a foundation wall, or one broken section of driveway. The price moves with the slab's thickness, how many feet we cut, whether we're working indoors and whether you want the pieces hauled off, and a slab with rebar, the steel bars that hold it together, costs more to cut than a plain one. The schedule mostly turns on what's inside the slab and whether the cut reaches the sidewalk or street, which brings the city in. You get your own figure in a written estimate after I've seen the job.

I start every cut by finding out what's inside the slab, because in a post-tensioned slab, one with steel cables pulled very tight inside it, nicking a cable can weaken the structure and hurt somebody. One scanning company's guide says to scan the area before any drilling, coring or cutting and to stop if the planned opening runs into a cable, and that's how we work. If a cable is in the way, we stop and rethink the cut. Then we pick the tool, usually a walk-behind saw for flatwork, which is what we call driveways, patios, walks and floors, or a core drill for a round hole. Most of our sawing runs wet so the dust stays down, and wet cutting leaves slurry, a gray paste of water and concrete dust, so we vacuum it up and contain it instead of washing it down your driveway.

Cutting is often the first day of a bigger job. When we cut out a broken section, we can pour it back or replace the whole thing as part of concrete driveway building, and when a patio gets opened up for a drain or a gas line, we put it back together with concrete patio construction. We also saw control joints, the shallow grooves that tell a new slab where to crack, into our fresh pours on time, because a joint cut late is how you end up with cracks in places nobody picked.

If your cut touches the city's side of the property line, meaning the sidewalk, the curb or the street out front, the City of Pomona requires a permit for any work in its public right-of-way. Driveway approaches and sidewalk panels are where this usually comes up, so I'll flag it when I'm out for the estimate. When a job needs a permit, we pull it and handle the paperwork with the city, and that's usually what sets the start date on a curb-side cut.

Around Pomona we cut a lot of older driveways and patios where one panel has dropped and the rest is sound, plus garage floors that need a trench for a new drain line, and we see the same calls on jobs in Claremont and La Verne. In summer heat, slurry dries fast and leaves a gray film that's hard to get off, so we pick it up as we go instead of at the end.