EARTHQUAKE: THE ROAD TO RECOVERY : Racing Along the Road to Riches : Rebuilding: Driven by incentives, firms strive to resurface the quake- damaged Simi Valley Freeway by Thursday.

Midnight: From high atop a shut-down section of the Simi Valley Freeway, the San Fernando Valley looks serene, belying the frenzied race for dollars under way on the shattered roadbed.

“You get up here this time of night, and it’s kind of beautiful,” said Larry Vogel, looking down on the quiet streets of Granada Hills. No one stirs in the suburban community of ranch-style houses, seemingly frozen in time in the 1950s.

“You know, this would be a great place to build a house, right up here on the freeway,” he said, standing on the remains of a westbound slow lane, crumbled by the earthquake Jan. 17.

“Sometimes I stand out here and think, let’s not open the son of a bitch back up. Let’s just build condos.”

But Vogel has little time to ruminate. He’s the night foreman for Security Paving, a Sun Valley company that in a venture with Reyes Construction of Diamond Bar won the contract to clear the rubble and resurface the freeway for 2.5 miles from Balboa Boulevard to the San Diego Freeway.

If they can get the job done by Thursday, just 14 days for work that would normally take many months, the two firms will share a $4-million fee. In the unlikely event they beat that deadline, they get a reward of $16,000 for every day they finish early--but if they run over, they lose $16,000 a day from the $4 million.

Although Caltrans estimates it will be about a year before the freeway is rebuilt, the agency hopes this interim work will make available a couple of lanes in each direction by Thursday--a month to the day after the quake.

The $16,000 daily penalty or bonus is not a huge amount, in comparison with the total contract. But the reputation of these two relatively small companies is on the line and they want to make that 14-day deadline.

And as Vogel stands there, it’s already Day 8.

* 12:05 a.m.: After his brief break, Vogel turns back to a scene that is in stark contrast to the serenity of the Valley below.

A huge hydraulic hammer on a crane is smashing old concrete into chunks. Motorized loaders driven by workers wearing ear protectors hoist rubble onto 10-wheel trucks.

Smaller trucks topped with yellow flashing lights scurry back and forth, carrying supervisors and Caltrans inspectors checking on work up and down the road. Nearby, laborers set 200-pound metal forms in place, pounding wooden wedges underneath to level them before they are filled with wet concrete mix.

The whole scene is illuminated this moonless night by portable light towers, each powered by its own gas generator.

“After the earthquake, I didn’t think I would get to be a part of the reconstruction,” said Vogel, 42, who been doing road grading and related construction work for 22 years.

“I thought the bigger companies would swallow up all the work,” he said.

Security Paving is a family-run firm with decades of experience in building roadways and bridges in Southern California. But this is its first freeway job.

“We’re very close to schedule, actually maybe a little ahead,” said Vogel, driving his pickup to check on a site. Work began even before the contract was formally signed.

“We were up here on Thursday night, right after word came that the bid was accepted,” he says. “By the time the contract was signed the next morning, I already had four stompers pounding away, making a hell of a racket.”

Work has continued 24 hours a day ever since. During the day, new concrete is poured and smoothed by 24-foot-wide, mechanized screed rollers. Each night, workers race to prepare the ground for more concrete the next day.

With a work force of about 24, “we knock out the old and make room for the new,” Vogel said. The workday for him and his crew goes from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

* 12:50 a.m.: Vogel stops to talk to Mike Mattivi, son of one of the owners of Security Paving, taking a turn on a loader. Mattivi, 21, has been working for the company since the week after he graduated from high school.

“I kind of volunteered for the night shift on this one,” said the quiet-spoken Mattivi. Like the laborers he is supervising near the San Fernando Mission Boulevard crossing, he is dressed in a hooded sweat shirt over several layers of clothing to ward off the cold.

Like Vogel, he is happy to have a crack at this big-time work.

“A lot of people are getting hurt by this earthquake,” he said, adding matter-of-factly: “A lot of people are getting helped.”

Vogel turns to Mattivi. “In another week,” Vogel said, “we’ll know on which side of that we’re on.”

* 2:15 a.m.: Tommy Mattivi, Mike’s father and one of the owners of Security Paving, is operating a loader on the eastern end of the project, near Haskell Avenue, riding it into a pronounced dip in the roadway.

“The bridges in this part were pretty much OK,” he says. “It was the surface that sunk.”

The older Mattivi’s temper is well-known to those on the night shift, but on this night he’s in a good mood. “It’s a challenge for us, really a challenge,” he says, climbing down from the loader to redirect some of the laborers.

The challenge is not so much the job, but doing it by the deadline and avoiding the penalties. “It’s like going to Las Vegas,” he says.

Mattivi, 47, wearing an orange reflecting vest, walks over to a freeway divider to eat a couple of tacos, which have long since gone cold.

He watches workers pull metal forms into place. Even though the temperature is edging into the 40s, the workers’ shirts are wet with sweat.

“You ever think you have a hard life,” Tommy Mattivi says, “come watch these guys.”

* 4:20 a.m.: A crew of five from Reyes Construction pours wheelbarrows of cement into narrow forms that stretch across the Simi Valley Freeway near where it meets the San Diego Freeway.

They are making a “pavement notch,” which is supposed to let the roadway expand and compress under the influence of heat, cold or earthquake. “It used to be three inches wide in the old freeway,” says crew member Mickey Gutierrez, shining a light into the revolving cement mixer to check on the mixture’s moisture content. “Now it will be nine (inches)” to give it more flexibility in future quakes.

Gutierrez, 37, was hired for this job. “I was working for a company that bid on the job, but they didn’t get it,” he said, shrugging. “I had to work.”

* 5:35 a.m. Orestes Pena drives a 10-wheel truck onto the temporary roadway made for them on the freeway. He is the founder and president of the Sun Valley company that rented the trucks for this project to the two construction firms.

“They wanted eight trucks, but I only had seven drivers available because they are working so hard and needed to rest,” Pena said. “So I jumped in.”

The number 724 is painted in large numerals on the truck cab. “That is the number of the (U. S. Navy) destroyer that picked me up when I came from Cuba,” said Pena, who fled his homeland in a small boat he secretly built in his apartment, following plans from Popular Mechanics magazine.

“That number is on all my trucks,” he said with pride.

Like Mattivi, with whom he often works, Pena hopes his company turns into a family dynasty. “I got this truck for my son,” Pena said, pointing to the Peterbilt 10-wheeler he bought three days earlier, “so he will be interested in the business.”

* 5:55 a.m. As dawn brings light to the sky in the east, the day-shift workers begin arriving, parking their cars on the on- and off-ramps.

One struggles to fire up a portable “jumping jack” pounder, yanking the starter cord repeatedly. “C’mon, baby, c’mon baby,” he coaxes the machine.

Watching from the side as he finishes his last coffee of the night is Hector Andrade, 34, who landed this job a couple of days earlier. “It’s sad how this had to happen for me to get the work,” he said, referring to the earthquake.

“But if I don’t do it, the work will go to someone else.”

Tommy Mattivi makes one last check on the night’s progress. “It’s never as much as I hope to get done,” he said. “But we are doing OK, very good.”

On the western end, Mike Mattivi is also calling it a night, gazing out over the slowly reviving freeway under the growing light of the sunrise.

“In a couple of weeks, you won’t be able to walk up here like this,” he said. “But when I drive across it, I’ll always be thinking, ‘I helped build this road.’ ”