Earthquake: The Long Road Back : Crews Toil Nonstop to Rebuild Freeways : Roads: More than 1,500 workers fan out to 500 sites. Caltrans and its subcontractors award 17 repair and demolition contracts.

Standing on the southbound Golden State Freeway and staring at a 2,000-foot gap in what once was a connector bridge from the Antelope Valley Freeway, engineer Henry Amigable drew an arm along his brow and gestured at the well-orchestrated bustle of his company’s heavy machinery.

A worker in a crane used giant shears to rip away dripping, spaghetti-like reinforcement bars hanging off the end of the broken bridge. Crews on the ground used hydrohammers to smash fallen concrete slabs into small rocks. Bulldozer operators dodged around the defacto obstacle course, loading the wreckage of the connector ramp into waiting dump trucks.

“This is the remains,” said Amigable of Granite Construction Co., a Caltrans subcontractor. “And we’re the ones who deal with the remains.”

Throughout Los Angeles, Amigable and others who deal with such road remains struggled to do just that. Some left the wreckage of their own homes to report to their jobs; most worked bone-wearying hours, through tremor after tremor on unstable and crumbling ground, to begin to put the transit system back together again like so many pieces of a giant, fractured maze.

And all around the construction sites was an urgent reminder of the importance of their duties: the excruciatingly long lines of rerouted cars visible to the workers as they went about their tasks.

Since the day the quake crumbled crucial arteries of the city’s freeways, more than 1,500 workers have fanned out to 500 sites in the city’s interstates and highways, from the Westside to the West Valley to the Newhall Pass. Their mission is to inspect, to rip down and to repair.

In the first week after the quake, Caltrans and its subcontractors awarded 17 repair and demolition contracts and identified 12 unsafe bridges, said Caltrans spokesman Rick Holland. Seven of those bridges will be shored up and restabilized; five are not salvageable and will be ripped down and rebuilt.

The race to restore a sane commute began just after dawn on Jan. 17, with crews cleaning and clearing.

On a fractured one-mile section of the Santa Monica Freeway, demolition crews have rapidly torn down and removed more than 70 million pounds of reinforced concrete and debris from two collapsed freeway bridges.

“We haven’t stopped since we started,” said Roy Fisher, a Caltrans senior bridge engineer and the person responsible for demolition on the Santa Monica Freeway. “We’ve probably done a month’s work in a week.”

Nighttime rain and cooler temperatures gave no reprieve. When darkness fell and commuters’ cars lined up for miles along the freeway’s flank, the 12-member night crew moved in and pushed on with the task of knocking down the fractured Venice Boulevard bridge.

Two crane operators worked side by side, hammering away at the broken bridge. Several bulldozers scooped up the fallen blocks of concrete and loaded them onto dump trucks.

“We got soaked, but we worked right through it,” said Tony May, 45, who has spent the days since the quake loading trucks and digging pits for new freeway columns. “It doesn’t bother us; work is work. When it rains, it just means you get wet.”

Roy Fisher, 32, has seen very little of his wife or 17-month-old baby in Gardena since the quake. Shifts have been a minimum of 15 hours long. There have not been any days off.

“I sleep and dream about this stuff all night and all day,” Fisher said. “This is my focus, 100%. We won’t stop until the job is done.”

At 6 a.m., a new 30-member crew arrived and quickly huddled with Fisher to map out the day’s strategy. Their plan was to work through the night to clear Venice Boulevard of debris from the fallen bridge and then reopen it to traffic.

And they were successful. Fisher and his team were able to clear out the broken bridge early Wednesday and expect to reopen Venice Boulevard today.

Across Los Angeles, on the Golden State Freeway, under the hulk of the broken Antelope Valley Freeway connector ramp, crews of 20 Granite Construction workers toiled day and night to clean away the broken bridge. After sundown, they worked under 10 light towers perched on hillsides above.

The long hours paid off. Originally projected as a 10-day job, clearing instead was finished in four. The freeway break, smoothed over and cleaned of its dripping cables, now looks as if it was cleanly cut by a giant knife.

After the heavy-equipment operators finished their hauling and after the water truck drivers moved on to cool down another site, Granite called in the services of two last workers with four last pieces of equipment: Trace Boden and Oscar Ostos, and their hands.

“You can do a lot with equipment,” explained foreman Frank Eppler, on his third 12-hour-plus day. “But you can’t do it all.”

So Boden, 27, and Ostos, 30, worked their way down the quieted stretch of freeway. The pair bent over and scraped at the freeway floor with their hands, pulling up leftover bits of stone and twisted metal and tossing them into a heap.

Both men are from Canyon Country. Both lost belongings and bits of their homes to the quake and both left the disarray in favor of work. They were matter-of-fact about their tasks.

“I guess we’re out here to do the dirty work,” Boden said, using a short break to stand up tall, squinting in the bright sun and stretching his long back. “It’s mostly heavy machinery, then it’s us.”

Elsewhere in the city, six maintenance crews and six bridge crews from throughout the state have spent the past week and a half evaluating and repairing the shaky above-ground transit ways.

Perched precariously underneath a buckled and separated connector bridge between the Foothill and Golden State freeways, bridge maintenance worker Robert Orozco worked his eighth-straight day of 16-hour shifts on Monday.

His home in Sylmar also showed the force of the quake: cracks in every room, a separated foundation, treasures collected over the years crushed. Orozco’s confidence in his wife, who worked at home cleaning up and caring for their three children, enabled him to focus on his job despite his fatigue, he said.

“I think about my family when I’m at work,” Orozco said. “I just know that they’re in good hands.”

Orozco and four other men were charged with shoring up the bridge, which had separated and dropped by several inches at its connector joints. The men used timber lifters, as if they were old-fashioned ice block carriers, to together hoist up 400-pound, 12-by-12-foot wooden support beams.

While others worked on the top part of the bridge, filling in cracks and replacing strained reinforcement bar, the five men underneath jammed the timber beams into the concrete base of the bridge and nailed them down. The beams, called bents, are meant to last until the structure can be replaced, explained John Hogan, a Caltrans area superintendent.

A mirror image of the two teams was busy at work at the bridge’s other connection point.

An aftershock stopped the men on top for just a second, as they looked around and reaffirmed that they were safe and that the bridge had stopped shaking like a tree branch in the wind.

Caltrans says that construction workers have suffered no major injuries, in spite of the long hours, difficult and dangerous work and a grueling pace. But motorists have not been so lucky: early Wednesday, a woman drove off a 22-foot portion of the freeway’s broken bridge at Fairfax Avenue and a week ago, a catering truck driver careened off the broken Antelope Valley Freeway connector. Neither was critically injured.

“I was feeling really good all week,” said Fisher, the Santa Monica Freeway’s demolition supervisor. “But I’m a little down right now because this woman flew off this bridge. That bugs me. I didn’t want to see anybody get hurt on this job for any reason, whether it’s us or the public. I feel bad about it.”

Out at what used to be the Antelope Valley connector, Eppler, deeply tanned and with etched lines around his eyes from years as a Granite Construction foreman in the California sun, folded his burly arms across his blue shirt and orange safety vest.

He struggled to find the right words to explain a construction worker’s attitude at times like these--why he does what he does and how he finds the energy to do it is not something he normally thinks about, he said.

“We’ve got a job to do: Clean up this road and get things back to normal for all of us,” he finally said. “You work and you put your own personal problems behind you. Don’t you?”