Road Warriors : Caltrans Workers Face Biggest Fear: L.A. Drivers

On days off, Keith Baty is a bungee jumper, leaping from 70-foot heights on the end of a tether. But when he talks about danger-- real danger--he speaks of work, about being out on the freeways at night: cars flying toward him, their headlights glaring.

Drunk drivers. Runaway trucks. Beer bottles hurled in anger, fluttering like bats in the darkness.

Baty has seen them all--sometimes on the dead run.

“It’s as scary as (bleep)!” he said. “You don’t know what fool you’re going to run across next . . . don’t know if (he) is going to shoot you or run over you!”

Baty is a longtime Caltrans worker, paid to live in the fast lane. His night life is half-Hitchcock, half-Indianapolis 500. “I know what ‘the bird’ is by now, that’s for sure,” the 14-year veteran quipped a few nights ago, overseeing lane closures near the $350-million Harbor Freeway construction project near downtown Los Angeles. “I’ve had a full course of the bird!”

Even for a city sprawled along a very dense and intimidating latticework of freeways, Los Angeles is experiencing a banner year for highway construction. The current bumper crop of projects includes not only the 2.6-mile double-decking of the Harbor Freeway, but also continuing work on four multimillion-dollar interchanges joining the new Century Freeway to existing routes.

Numerous other, smaller projects have pushed the price tag of existing roadway contracts in the Los Angeles-Ventura County region to an unprecedented $1 billion, said Caltrans spokesman Russell Snyder.

Much of the work is scheduled at night to avoid traffic congestion. Hazards are present in every form--tricky artificial lighting, heavy equipment, high platforms, fatigue, passing cars. In April, a 45-year-old crane operator working in the wee hours became the first fatality on the Harbor Freeway project when his 100-foot-tall rig toppled and crushed him.

But by far the scariest part of the job is dealing with the cars, workers say. In the minds of many highway crew members, motorists at night are faceless, mindless monsters, bent on destruction. Traffic accidents have killed 27 state Caltrans workers in the past 19 years, despite untold thousands of wood barricades, bright orange safety cones, huge blinking arrows and reflecting uniforms.

“It’s amazing . . . we close ramps, close freeways, put signs up, then people will drive right through the work area,” said Caltrans engineer Roland Williams, who has spent 26 years in road construction.

Richard Acosta of Alert Barricade, a company that places safety cones in traffic under Caltrans’ direction, must lean precariously from a moving truck, exposed to rushing traffic at that uneasy point where the rubber meets the road.

“It’s like hell,” he said. “People cuss you out, they throw things. You see a lot of accidents, fatalities . . . at least one (accident) a night. I saw a guy get hit (by cars while) running across the freeway. That was three weeks ago. He died out here on the spot.”

Recently, Caltrans outfitted the Harbor Freeway construction site with two $30,000 devices called Dragnets, specialized fences that function like the cables on aircraft carriers for slowing and stopping jet planes. In theory, the Dragnets will form a last line of defense to prevent cars from plowing into the restricted work zone.

Before they were installed, maverick cars were a persistent problem. Recently, one came “right through the cones and ended up with a cone stuck in his grill,” Williams said. “The CHP stopped him and the guy said, ‘I didn’t see anything.’ ”

Even as Williams spoke, heavy work was proceeding behind him. Tall hydraulic lifts were moving a 130-ton framework of beams and girders needed to build the upper freeway deck. Balanced nearly 50 feet up under the glare of portable lights, the steel truss was creeping down the freeway median.

Traffic, meanwhile, was being diverted; all northbound lanes were closed at Slauson Avenue, southbound lanes at Martin Luther King Boulevard.

The entire project required about 40 people. Most worked for construction contractor C.C. Myers, Inc., while Caltrans officials supervised the effort and kept cars away. Williams watched the movement of the truss for a time before hopping in a truck to check out the north lane closure.

Horror stories filled Williams’ mind. He recalled the time, years ago, when he was a part of a crew working in tunneled-out areas beneath the surface of the New Jersey Turnpike. A tanker truck suddenly lost control, flipped and tumbled into the work site, “coming right at me,” Williams remembered. Scrambling out of the way, he watched while several workers became trapped, temporarily, in shallow tunnels under the wreckage--terrified but unharmed.

Williams guided his truck through the line of cones and parked in an area blocked off from traffic. Stepping out, he glanced back at the headlights angling toward the off-ramp, a steady stream even at 3 in the morning. He refrained, however, from switching on the yellow safety siren atop the truck; a study found that such lights attract drunks.

Two other Caltrans officials already were keeping watch on the closure: Andrew Baldwin, a veteran, and Jim Kaufman, a new hire who had spent the past eight years doing road construction in Calaveras County, a place so rural that it boasts but a single traffic light.

Adjusting to L.A. freeways was making Kaufman as jumpy as a Calaveras frog--especially after one of his partners was clunked by a wine bottle. It hasn’t helped that Kaufman is working the, ah, graveyard shift. “You’ve got to have eyes in the back of your head,” he said warily.

Williams told the two closure men about a few cones that had been knocked down; they’d need to be replaced, and pronto . Meanwhile, word came over Williams’ CB radio that an accident had occurred down at the south closure, and he was rolling again.

By the time Williams arrived, safety flares lined the freeway and northbound traffic was being removed at Gage Avenue. A pair of California Highway Patrol cars occupied the closure area and a battered sedan was hoisted on a tow truck. Two employees of Alert Barricade--Acosta and Kelly Pierce--told Williams that a Corvette had just been towed.

“They hauled a lady off--she was drunk,” Pierce said. After the wreck, he added, “a guy came through the closure and about nine cars followed him. . . . The CHP wrote them all tickets.”

Pierce, 23, a four-year veteran, talked of the time a passing diesel truck ripped off one of his mirrors and of the night when he leaped a low wall to elude a car.

Then, looking up, Pierce realized that several flares had burned out. A car appeared to be coming straight for the closure--toward the unlighted tow truck and CHP cars. At once, Pierce took off in a sprint, running at the headlights, waving his arms.