Road Workers’ Nighttime Duty Is Paved With Fatigue, Peril

It was just past midnight as Adolfo Ramirez slumped in the seat of an asphalt-spreader hunkered in the middle of California 118 in Saticoy.

Thick steam rose from the hot asphalt as Ramirez rubbed his bloodshot eyes and surveyed the stretch of torn-up highway. Huge fluorescent lights illuminated a cluster of hulking machines run by a dozen workers rushing to complete the paving project and reopen the roadway by dawn.

A brief lag in asphalt delivery from a nearby plant granted Ramirez and his co-workers a welcome rest from a resurfacing job that would last until 5 a.m. Then they would hurry off to another construction site and toil until midafternoon.

As a contract employee in a seasonal job that sporadically requires all-night shifts, Ramirez, 34, sacrifices sleep and family life to take every bit of work that comes his way.

The day before, Ramirez had clambered aboard the roaring machine at 6:30 a.m. and ran it almost nonstop, his only break a two-hour dash to his Pacoima home to shower, eat and bounce the youngest of his five children on his lap before rushing back to work.

By the time his shift was done, Ramirez would work nearly 33 hours straight.

It’s times like this that Ramirez consoles himself by thinking about the money.

“I’ll get overtime,” he said, brightening momentarily. “But Uncle Sam takes so much; in the end, you wonder if it’s even worth it.”

Machine operators like Ramirez typically make about $20 an hour and, after 12 hours, he makes about $40 an hour. But during the rainy season, he often goes without work for months at a time.

Halfway through the grueling shift, he tilted back his hard hat and wiped his hands on his grimy, fluorescent orange vest as he reflected on the job he has held for 15 years.

“The night work is the hardest because you never get to see your kids,” Ramirez said. “You don’t do it enough to get used to it, so you feel kind of sick all the time, like you’re hung over.”

Safety is also a concern. “At night, you’re always worried about getting hit by a drunk driver or by one of the machines,” Ramirez said. “It’s amazing how easy it could happen.”

Co-worker Jimmy Saldivar agreed. “It’s a lot harder to see at night,” he said.

Saldivar’s job is to ride on the back of the spreader and periodically stab the road with a pole, measuring the thickness of the asphalt to make sure that it is being laid evenly.

“I don’t wear my glasses during the day,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be able to see anything if I didn’t wear them at night.”

Since 1924, 140 state Department of Transportation construction employees have been killed on the job. An additional 39 contract employees have lost their lives since 1972, when Caltrans started keeping track.

“Working on the road is certainly a dangerous job,” Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago said. “There are risks involved with working so close to high volumes of moving traffic.”

But few injuries and no deaths have occurred in Ventura County, where congestion is more commonly associated with a cold than a highway condition.

For workers here, fatigue and boredom are the main enemies they battle through the night, telling jokes to stay awake and stomping their feet to keep out the chill.

“You have to find ways to keep yourself going,” said Rodney Leidy, Caltrans transportation engineer, “even when your body wants to sleep.”

Night projects are scheduled out of necessity, Leidy said, because they require shutting down most or all of the roadway.

“We’re trying to have as little negative impact on traffic as possible,” he said. “Sometimes the only way to do that is to work in the middle of the night.”

Such projects light up the night at half a dozen highway sites each month in Ventura County. In October, for example, 15 major road projects budgeted at more than $40 million were under way, many involving night work.

The Saticoy repaving work was expected to take four nights.

But repaving the roadway is just a small part of the Saticoy project. The main objective, Leidy said, is to eliminate the rickety Saticoy bridge, one of four bridges across the Santa Clara River linking Ventura to Oxnard and east Ventura County.

When completed, the 34-year-old, two-lane bridge will be replaced with a sleek, four-lane span. California 118 will be diverted diagonally across the railroad tracks, bypassing the heart of Saticoy, to link up with Wells Road, which will be extended southward.

More than 27,000 cars and trucks use the route daily, according to Caltrans. The count is the highest of any two-lane state highway in Ventura County.

Planners hope to have the entire project completed by summer.

But on this night, inspector Saeed Sami was more concerned with making sure that a single slice of roadway is properly paved.

He strolled along the strip, observing the laborers and scooping up samples of asphalt, which he sent to a lab in Los Angeles for analysis.

If the samples are found not to match the pre-approved mix of concrete and asphalt, the contractor could be required to tear up everything and start over.

“They don’t like it very much when that happens,” Sami said.

He stopped to confer with several other inspectors. They agreed to push the workers to step up the pace so they could finish on time.

But there wasn’t much they could do to accelerate the multi-step process.

First, the battered road surface is stripped away, leaving a grooved layer that is swept clean of loose dust. The ridged surface is drizzled with a sticky slick that looks like chocolate syrup and acts as an adhesive for the new layer of asphalt.

Once the asphalt is spread, a series of rollers squash the lines and softness out of it. Then, before lanes and side stripes can be painted, the road must set--a process that can take between 10 minutes and two hours.

Through it all, Fernando Macias kept watch. Macias works for a Saticoy-based barricade service that provides and maintains the cones and flashing signs that separate the workers from motorists.

“This is like working on the front lines,” Macias said. “You’re out here in the middle of the road in the middle of the night, and you never know what could happen.”

As motorists whizzed by, Macias trundled up and down the highway, righting toppled cones and shaking his head as he tossed smashed ones into the back of his pickup.

“Drunk drivers are the worst,” Macias said. “Somehow, they’re attracted to the reflectors, so instead of avoiding them, they go right for them.”