Painting Provides Her a Bridge to a New Career : Employment: Thirty-year-old mother learning the ropes as Caltrans apprentice on San Diego-Coronado span.

Laura Mellizo looks like an ordinary 30-year-old wife and mother. You’d probably never guess that, for the past 19 months, she’s been hanging from rigging 200 feet above San Diego Bay, maintaining one of the area’s most recognizable landmarks.

Mellizo is just 5 feet tall and weighs 125 pounds, but she can handle a high-pressure paint gun with skill and grace.

She is the California Department of Transportation’s only woman structural steel painter in Southern California. Translated from bureaucratese, that means she paints the Coronado Bridge.

More than 200 feet above the water, where winds often reach 40 m.p.h., the heat can be stifling and the chill expert at creeping under collars and cuffs, Mellizo is a painter’s apprentice.

Every day at 7 a.m., she climbs a set of stairs at the foot of the bridge on the Coronado side and walks along a narrow catwalk, where the noise and vibration produced by the thousands of cars and trucks speeding by overhead seem like an unending series of small earthquakes.

Bundled up in warm work clothes under white coveralls and a safety harness, Mellizo moves about with ease and confidence on scaffolding set up on a platform hanging from the bridge. At times she kneels on a 4-foot-wide extension hooked over the side of the platform, to paint concrete surfaces of the bridge.

The only thing next to her is wide-open space, beneath her only the bay.

Mellizo is unfazed by the vibrations or the soft swaying of the platform. She merely goes about her work. She is not afraid of working at elevations of more than 200 feet.

In August, Mellizo will finish a two-year apprenticeship with Caltrans. After a series of written and performance tests, she will probably be certified as a structural steel painter and will move on to a journey position among the bridge’s maintenance personnel.

Mellizo was working as a toll collector on the same bridge when she saw a Caltrans flyer announcing the apprenticeship program.

“I had done painting and landscaping before, so I decided, well, I’ll give it a try,” she said. “But seriously, I thought I’d never even be considered.”

What did Mellizo’s husband, Leo, a tile setter, think about her applying for the position?

“First he started laughing,” she said. “But, as the time went by, he said, ‘Go for it!’

“He never said anything against it. He seemed really proud.”

Much to her surprise, Mellizo was called in for a series of tests of her knowledge of painting preparations and of her physical ability to perform the work. The latter included a walk on the catwalk under the bridge.

“I didn’t feel anything,” she said about being up so high. “The only problem was the sandblasting.”

Because of her size and the force produced by the equipment used to sandblast, Mellizo wasn’t sure she could handle that part of the job.

But she passed all the tests and was hired as an apprentice. “I was really shocked,” she said.

Mellizo is the only woman in a team of five working on the Coronado Bridge and the only woman bridge painter in Southern California.

Caltrans has three bridge-painting crews statewide. In the San Francisco Bay Area, there are 11 women, half of them at the journey level and the others apprentices, said Glenn Annis, painters manager for Caltrans in Northern California. They work on several bridges that cross San Francisco Bay.

In Los Angeles, a crew of five men works on the Vincent Thomas Bridge spanning a Los Angeles Harbor shipping channel, said Glenn Hough, a spokesman for Caltrans in Los Angeles.

Before working for Caltrans, Mellizo had been in the California Conservation Corps, where she painted lampposts along Adams Avenue and worked to restore a youth center.

Her training includes everything from first aid and safety to the proper setup of scaffolding and rigging. She has also learned to use the sandblasting equipment without being knocked off the platform she works on and to use the force of the equipment to her advantage.

The work is hard. She must sandblast, hand scrub, steam clean, caulk, grind and scrape before beginning to apply any of the four coats of primer and paint that give the bridge its distinctive blue color.

“I’m learning a lot,” she said. “I feel like I’m learning all the time.”

Her instructors and co-workers agree.

“She’s an excellent student,” said David Zapata, lead painter for the group and one of Mellizo’s instructors. “She is into the work. She is really willing to learn.”

Garry Zimmerman, another co-worker and an instructor of Mellizo’s, said: “She’s got a real good attitude. She gives 110%. It’s great.”

Besides the learning, Mellizo said, she has a view of San Diego and the bay that can’t be beat.

“Being outdoors, you can see the ocean and all of the ships that come in,” she said.

This is the view from a place where at times the noise can be so loud that workers have to scream when they speak to each other. Other times, when traffic slows down, the only sound is that of the wind blowing through the bridge, and even a whisper carries.

But what Mellizo enjoys most about her job is the chance to be a part of the bridge, through the labor and care she puts into maintaining it.

“I know I’m doing something good for the bridge,” she said. “I can say, ‘Oh, I did that.’ ”

Mellizo said she wants to work on the bridge as long as she can.

“I’m going to be here for a long time,” she said. “I wonder if I can stay here until I’m 50 years old? Can you imagine an old lady climbing steel?

“Yeah, I can do it.”