Funeral Feeds Road Workers’ Fears : Woodland Hills: Caltrans employees gather to mourn Callie Joel Buser, the fifth highway worker killed on the job in the last three months.

As they sat silent and uneasy under the soaring roof of St. Bernardine’s Catholic Church in Woodland Hills on Monday, each of the 200 men and women dressed in road-hazard orange knew that they might be next.

They knew that it could just as easily be their casket at the front of the church, their family weeping in the front row.

But these were not police officers or soldiers. They were maintenance men, landscapers, tractor drivers and surveyors--Caltrans employees gathered to mourn Callie Joel Buser, the fifth highway worker to be killed on the job in the last three months.

For some, this was the third funeral in three months. Too many, they said bitterly. None of the men had to die, they said. Several said Caltrans is doing all it can to protect roadside workers from danger.

The ultimate responsibility for worker safety, they said, lies with drivers who pass within inches of them at freeway speeds.

“The fact is, people just are not aware how dangerous our job is,” said Carol Morin, a freeway maintenance worker from Moorpark. “We do the best we can to take care of each other. But we are human, and it doesn’t take much to take a life.”

During the past 20 years, 52 Caltrans workers and 39 private contractors statewide have been killed while working. By comparison, 45 California Highway Patrol officers, 32 Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and 37 Los Angeles police officers died on duty in the same period. Before the recent spate of fatalities, no freeway workers had been killed in Los Angeles or Ventura counties since 1988.

Buser was hit by a suspected drunk driver last Wednesday as he performed survey work on the shoulder of the Antelope Valley Freeway. He was killed instantly. Just a week before, friends said, Buser attended a routine safety class and urged his co-workers to watch out for each other.

“He told us that there are a lot of crazy drivers out there,” said surveyor Mike Austen of Monrovia. “If he could get hit, any of us could.”

Even workers with just a few months on the job have at least one harrowing tale of dodging death only through agility or fortune. Morin, for instance, leaped over a concrete divider just a few days ago to avoid a car on the Moorpark Freeway. And Don Griffiths said a car with locked brakes screeched within inches of him on Angeles Crest Highway.

“When you take this job, you realize it’s dangerous,” said Griffiths, a landscaper from Glendora, as he walked out of the church. “It is more apparent now.”

Griffiths said his wife and 6-year-old daughter fear for his safety, but there is little more he can do to protect himself. He parks his truck behind him to block oncoming cars. He watches out for his co-workers. Shutting down freeways during construction or maintenance probably would anger commuters, although the idea has been suggested by Caltrans officials.

Griffiths and others said the key to saving lives lies in a Caltrans slogan directed at motorists: “Give ‘em a brake.”

“We need to heed that word,” said the Rev. Alden Sison, Buser’s minister at St. Bernardine’s. “Someone didn’t give someone a brake.”

“People don’t understand what it’s like to have a speeding semi truck pass four inches from your back,” Morin said as she and other workers formed a procession of orange trucks and vans heading to the San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills.

At the cemetery, workers in orange Caltrans shirts and blue jeans hung their heads and listened intently as Sison’s voice was drowned out now and then by the gentle, mechanical breathing of traffic on the nearby freeways.