Building A Road

by Susan Cameron

Back in 1993, I wrote about how I made my living in 1981...wow, I've been alive a long time! Whoo-hoo!

In the old days, before I worked on a road crew, I never gave a thought to the streets I drove upon. Streets were simply there, like smog and palm trees. My perspective changed, however, when I became an apprentice operating engineer and went to work building roads.

I discovered that there are good road crews and bad road crews, and you don't want to work on a bad one. A bad road crew looks like an anthill that just got stepped on -- there's mass confusion, people getting in each other's way and on each other's nerves. On the other hand, watching a good road crew is like watching a good sports team or ballet company -- the workers have strong individual skills combined with excellent teamwork. Each worker has to perform the right task in the right place at the right time and then get out of the way. A good crew works smoothly and -- dare I use this word when referring to construction work? -- gracefully, with a minimum of wasted time and effort.

Actually, the creation of a street begins long before the construction crews arrive. The street is designed in accordance with local regulations, blueprints are made, and the land is staked out by a survey crew working from the blueprints and existing benchmarks (points of reference). Next, any water pipes or sewer lines that will run under the street have to be installed. If the pipe crew loses or destroys too many stakes, the survey crew will have to return to restake the job site for the concrete curb and gutter and for the grading crew.

Ah yes, the grading crew, the road crew. These are the people you curse under your breath as they block your car's path with their orange cones and delineators, the people who screw up your commute by tearing up what seems to be a perfectly good street on just the day you're running late for work. Let's take a closer look at the members of this rogue's gallery while the traffic backs up.

You see quite a few laborers. They do the hand work, the pick-and-shovel work, and they assist the heavy equipment operators. There's a person sitting in a little tractor with a bucket on the front and a row of metal teeth on the back. This machine is called a skiploader, and it is adept at getting into corners and tight places that bigger equipment can't reach. There's a water truck and driver. You spot a steamroller, but they're simply called rollers now since they're powered by diesel fuel, not steam. And is that a woman operating it? Yes, and her title is roller man -- gender be damned. You can't tell by looking at her, but she is also the grade checker. The grade checker reads the blueprints and survey stakes, then pounds markers called hubs into the ground with a sledgehammer to show the operators how much to cut or how much to fill in order to reach grade. A mathematical miscalculation could cost the construction company thousands of dollars. (Grade checkers are very careful people who become addicted to Mylanta as they age).

There is one more piece of equipment, the biggest on this job site. Its tires are as tall as a man, and it stretches out like a long, yellow grasshopper clutching an 8-foot-long stick under its body. That stick is a cutting tool called a mowboard, the entire piece of equipment is called a blade, and it is operated by the blade man. On this type of job, the blade man is God. The rest of the road crew assists and supports the blade man's work like an operating room team supports the surgeon's work. A good blade man can wield that mowboard like a surgeon does a scalpel, delicately peeling off a layer of compacted soil or rock less than half an inch thick, just like peeling an apple with a half-ton knife. That same mowboard can lay down tons of roadbed base rock in minutes.

Okay, back to work. The roller compacts the soil subgrade, the grade checker stakes it, the blade and skiploader bring it to grade. It passes compaction tests administered by an independent soils-testing laboratory, and it passes city inspection. Now it' s time to add the layers of compacted rock that make up the roadbed underneath the asphalt layer we see on top. The belly-dump trucks roll in, dropping their loads of mixed rock and "fines," tiny particles of crushed rock and sand that will lend cohesion to the roadbed. The blade knocks down the rockpiles into flat layers; each layer is sprayed with water by the water truck, then compacted by the roller, then another layer is added until rock grade is reached. The grade checker stakes it, blade and skip grade it, soils man and city inspector pass it, and then comes the asphalt.

The asphalt is usually laid down by an asphalt crew with a special paving machine and finishing tools. However, if the asphalt crew is unavailable, the grading crew can do the job with its own equipment, though everybody hates it very much. (Asphalt is hot, sticky, stinky, and difficult to remove from equipment and boots). Asphalt is usually laid in two layers, base and finish; rolling finish asphalt is an art form learned after much practice.

The new road has to pass final inspection and get striped by the painters, if necessary. Then the road barricades are removed, and the traffic is waved in. The commuters are happy again -- at least until they run across the next road crew.

copyright 1993, Susan Cameron