Men of Steel : Ironworkers Fixing Freeways Endure Fatigue of Grueling Hours

It’s midnight in the shadows of a deserted freeway underpass and ironworker Fred (Coco) Smith is slouched behind the wheel of his Buick Riviera--waiting to report to work for the 30th consecutive day, talking in a trance-like voice about what it’s like to be drop-dead, running-on-empty tired.

“You feel like you’re already dead,” he is saying, his fingers lazily wandering the radio dial for a bit of the blues. “Your eyes have cement shades and you’re so sluggish. Your feet weigh 1,000 pounds each, like you’re walking underwater.”

Since January’s massive Northridge earthquake toppled numerous freeway spans across Los Angeles, crews of bleary-eyed construction workers have labored literally around the clock to put those concrete and steel Humpty Dumpties back together again--enduring a fatigue factor that has ground them down like a car engine without oil, making them sweaty, zombie-like strangers to their own wives and children.

For Smith, a 42-year-old father of three who has spent a quarter of a century as an ironworker, the disaster has meant 12 successive weeks of pulling a grueling shift known as a 7-10--working seven days a week, 10 hours a day--first at the Santa Monica Freeway and now rebuilding the Golden State-Antelope Valley freeway interchange.

From midnight to 10 a.m.--day after day, 70 hours a week, in the rain and wind and darkness--Smith and a tightknit crew of 15 other Local 416 union ironworkers have pulled the second leg of a nightmarish graveyard shift that has shaken their once-stable family lives worse than any earthquake.

Now they find themselves grouchy with their wives and children--that’s when they get to see them. They have become absentee heads of their own households, forsaking responsibilities at their local churches, community groups, back yards and bedrooms.

Because, like Smith, these men in yellow hard hats and protective gloves are obsessed with just two things: work and sleep--fantasizing about sleep while on the job and dreaming of work during their fitful daytime slumbers.

After working sometimes 40 days in a row, their eyelids buckle as though supporting two gigantic construction cranes. At times, Smith’s steadily growing fatigue has caused him to fall asleep at the wheel of his car during the daily 42-mile drive back home to Whittier.

Some mornings, he plays a game of “driving-by-Braille,” dozing at the wheel until the clunka-clunka-clunka of his tires hitting the rounded, plastic lane dividers lurches him back to consciousness.

On the job, such weariness has strangely created a bond among the 15 men who work with Smith on the overnight crew as they mold strands of iron “rebar” into support structures for the soon-to-be-erected freeway bridge.

“When we see a guy slacking off or complaining about the job, we’ll yell at him,” Smith says. “We’ll use bad language. We’ll tell the guy to quit sniveling, to go home if he can’t do the job. Nobody wants to hear his complaints. We’re ironworkers, like we say, ‘rough and tough, hard to bluff, mean as a red-assed spider.’ ”

Indeed, there is a sense of pride, a sense of blue-collar machismo, being part of this bridge construction job. These men know the public is looking over their shoulder, waiting for their freeway to be delivered back to them later this year, but at the same time wanting the job done right, ready to accept no excuses for slipshod workmanship.

Recently, the owner of Tri-City Reinforcement handed out T-shirts bearing the Interstate 10 logo of the Santa Monica Freeway, along with the words “I was there.” The workers flocked around the shirts like birds of prey, holding them up proudly.

“In our business, it stands for something, that fact that you worked on these projects,” Smith says. “Because when ironworkers get together, they tell tales. And this job is the biggest tale of them all.”

Ironworker Jimmy Phillips, another member of the night crew, feels as though the Golden State Freeway job has simultaneously plopped his big steel-toed construction boots into both heaven and hell.

He feels like some oil worker on special duty in far-flung Alaska, making more money than he ever dreamed possible--grossing as much as $2,500 a week before taxes--but laboring such long hours that he has no time to spend it.

It is a construction worker’s Catch-22: While they are free to take a day off anytime they wish, most feel the money is just too good to pass up in their on-again, off-again industry where yearlong layoffs are commonplace.

“I have no social life, none at all,” says a brooding Phillips. “Like today, I mowed the lawn and then fell right into bed, dead tired. Ever so often, you have to take a couple of days off. It’s not only for your body, but for your mind. And for your family too.”

These days Phillips doesn’t even have time for his duties as church deacon and leader of the Sunday school at Little Zion Baptist Church in Compton.

“I haven’t been to church for three weeks,” he says with a sigh. “People have called to ask if there’s a problem. This job has changed my whole sense of being. I mean, I am but I ain’t, you know what I mean? Nobody sees me anymore. My spiritual life has been banished.”

While he knows the money is good, Phillips is ever-watchful for signs of stress at home with wife, Terrlyn, and 16-year-old daughter, Tanisha.

“My daughter is a teen-ager and she’s facing a lot of peer pressure at school. And I’m not there at home to sit with her after dinner and let her know that peer pressure is part of growing up. I’m up in bed sleeping.”

Sleeping, that is, without his wife.

“I sleep all day when my wife is at work. And she hates being alone at night. It’s her biggest complaint. Now she sleeps with a night light on at home because I’m not there. We’ve just been married for five years and the honeymoon isn’t over yet.

“At night, I want to be at home in bed with Terrlyn--not out here hauling around iron poles heavy enough to kill a man.”

For these men, the job site resembles some hostile planet, a surreal place of moving metal and foreign objects, where one wrong move can mean death or serious injury.

It’s a strange industrial city carved into the side of a hill, where the once-busy lanes of an old freeway now set the stage for a new behemoth, a new iron and steel bridge to the city.

The scene is back-lit by huge work lamps that can blind a man, make him feel like a scared animal caught in the flood of some highway headlights. It’s an atmosphere filled by the maddening whir and groan of heavy machinery--pay loaders and long-necked cranes that are like lumbering prehistorics, dwarfing solitary workers.

“You’ve got to keep on your toes here,” Smith says. “Because these crane operators can’t always see you. You get lost in the shadows of these big lights. It’s just plain dangerous.”

Night after night, the task of these ironworkers is to fasten bars of raw iron together into circular columns resembling gigantic Slinkys that will become the foundation of the towering bridge span. At night, the half-built iron-ribbed columns stand straight up in the darkness, looking like eerie towers from the Emerald City.

The crew boss is a Mighty Mouse of a man named Steve Pinder, a superior with a ponytail, earring and a wiry beard that sticks straight out like after an explosion, or in those old photographs of Civil War soldiers.

The men call him “Cowboy” because of his Western hat, and his voice is hoarse because he’s always yelling over the roar of the machines.

Working together in groups of three or four, Cowboy’s laborers hoist 2 3/4-inch-diameter iron bars weighing 1,500 pounds or more--staggering under the weight like drunken men, always watchful for the moving monster machinery that pass inches away.

Their finished product is placed into gaping holes 100 feet deep, plugged up by an ocean of concrete. At one such hole, roped off by yellow security tape like some gruesome crime scene, a worker peered into the blackness.

“It looks like the gates of hell,” he said. “Sometimes, this place gives me the creeps.”

Danger lurks here. Recently, one ironworker suffered a serious back injury when an unsupported column fell on top of him. His co-workers, many of whom have taken up a collection on his behalf, say it’s doubtful he’ll ever return to work.

“I don’t think it was the fatigue,” ironworker Dean Brasher said of the mishap. “Accidents just happen in an inhospitable place like this.”

Rick Rice, a spokesman for the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said that the agency is investigating the incident and that it’s still too early to say if worker fatigue was involved.

While the agency has no standards that would force a laborer to stop work because of exhaustion, Rice said common sense should prevail at freeway construction sites, which are considered hazardous workplaces, Cal-OSHA’s most-severe rating.

“Certainly, there is a potential for problems if people work long hours over a long period of time,” he said. “But you have to weigh that against an individual’s right to control his own destiny.”

Sometimes, ironworkers say, the pace of work takes its toll. Divorce rates among workers are high. And several have walked off the Antelope Valley Freeway job because of the demanding conditions and hours.

“For me, the money just wasn’t worth it,” said Brasher, who recently left the site with another worker. “My family is more important to me than money. And that job just wore on you after awhile.”

Indeed, construction work weighs heavy at home as well as on the job.

“We’ve given him up to his job,” Diane Pinder says about her husband, Steve. “We know it won’t last forever, so we take it while we can.”

Hardest hit, Diane says, has been their 8-year-old daughter, Brandy.

“For her, it’s confusing. She and her dad don’t play as much backgammon as they used to. She’s constantly asking, ‘How come daddy’s not home?’ ‘How come he’s going to bed in the middle of the day?’ Or just, ‘Where’s Daddy?’ ”

Fred Smith has also sacrificed his home life. Instead of being a father who likes to attend his daughter’s softball games or take his girls shopping, he has become a modern-day Rip Van Winkle.

“Dad tries to do all the things he used to do,” says 17-year-old Andrea Smith. “But he can’t. He’s too tired. When he drives, his eyes always get real heavy. I say, ‘Dad, maybe we should go home and go to sleep.’ ”