It’s a bright pageant of color. Under an azure sky, a parade of yellow vehicles rolls through the emerald countryside, trailing behind a black river of road.
It’s the N.C. Department of Transportation road oil crew, resurfacing country roads in Surry County on a gorgeous Indian Summer day. The procession of equipment is something to behold: first, an asphalt distributor laying a stream of chocolate-colored oil. That’s followed by a gravel-spreader, coupled to a dump truck feeding a continuous stream of crushed stone to be laid atop the oil. Then come a front-end loader, two rollers, more dump trucks, a broom tractor and assorted pickup trucks. It’s giant lemon millipede gobbling old roadway and replacing it with a ribbon of gleaming fresh asphalt.
The crew, from DOT’s Division 11 out of Wilkesboro, will repave about 3 miles of country roadway this day – about a typical day’s work. It takes a team of 24 employees and 18 vehicles and heavy equipment to lay that much road.
No, there’s not a clutch of a half-dozen guys standing around one person with a shovel. In fact, there’s only one shovel-wielder in sight. The rest are running the mostly computerized equipment, with about a half dozen workers posted at each end of the project and side roads along the way to control traffic.
The road-laying is an impressive display of precision. It’s harder than you think to guide a multi-ton gravel spreader down one lane and back the other without leaving a visible seam in the middle or wobbly edges. Under the equipment din, the workers communicate with a set of hand signals that would make a third-base coach proud.
The guys guffawed when I compared their teamwork to a ballet – these are chunky deer-hunters, mostly – but the coordination and precision were impressive. But supervisor Matthew Oliverson said that description is not far off: “It’s like a chain,” he said. “Everyone works together. They can read each other’s minds. They know what each other is doing.”
Like the rest of the DOT operation around the state, the work is hampered by the recession. The road oil crew normally is supplemented by about 15 temporary workers hired for the paving season. But DOT laid off some 2,000 temporaries this year, so Oliverson’s team has to make do by borrowing full-time employees from other parts of the operation. That means those workers aren’t able to do their regular jobs.
The impact – a lot less mileage being resurfaced. By year-end, the Wilkes team will complete about 75 miles of road, compared to 150 miles in normal years. There have been complaints, but so far the public has been understanding, says Oliverson. Their hope: that the recession ends soon, state coffers start filling back up, and these workers – proud of their public service – can get back to laying more asphalt.