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Part Three: 24 hours on T-REX

'It's not a profession for everyone'

Todd Heisler © News Santiago Perez, of Denver, scrapes dirt from concrete pillars in the Colorado Boulevard tunnel at I-25. New light-rail tracks will pass under Colorado at this location on their way to the Denver Tech Center. Expansion of the light-rail system is big part of T-REX, with $901.3 million of the project's $1.72 billion budget devoted to mass transit improvements. All photography »

6:18 p.m.

The sun is sinking fast, and the mud is late.

Mud is fast-drying concrete, which a team of just-starting-their-shift workers prepares to spread by hand down the slope of a new off-ramp for I-25 south at University. The mud was supposed to arrive at 6 p.m. sharp, and dusk is approaching.

ONLINE EXTRAS T-REX by the numbers » More photos on T-REX » A map of construction »

While they wait, workers arrange their tools for the task: shovels, trowels, a long rolling tube and a large rake five times wider than a golf course sand-trap rake. The hand tools are necessary because the off-ramp wall is oddly shaped, broadening from 12 feet wide at the top to 24 feet wide at the bottom.

The truck finally shows up at 6:30, and the mud slides down a chute. A man with a power nozzle hoses down the ground to keep it from drying too quickly. Men with shovels spread the mud on the moist dirt.

The shovelers wear rubber boots, duct-taped to their pants because concrete burns skin, Julio Contreras, the 27-year-old field engineer explains.

Contreras, a husky man with a motor on his hip and a hose in his hand, wades through a foot of wet concrete. It feels "like I'm an astronaut on the moon," he says.

The metal end of the hose vibrates, shaking air bubbles to the surface, where they pop. The air bubbles would otherwise weaken the dried mud.

Behind the mud-walkers come two men strapped to a long, spinning tube. They walk backward, leaning against harnesses that pull the tube along, smoothing the mud.

Alfredo Saucedo pulls one side of the tube. He is the finish foreman, which puts him basically in charge, but not immune to work. He wears a white T-shirt, a gold hoop in his right ear and a mustache that barely covers his upper lip.

7 p.m.

Bob Cooke likes the responsibility that comes with night work.

Cooke, 48, is T-REX's night superintendent for Segment 1, basically everything north of Hampden Avenue. He meets with his foremen over the hood of a yellow Southeast Corridor Constructors pickup truck in the yard of the Evans Field Office.

In his hand is a work sheet that lists 14 basic jobs for the night. Because there's a full-freeway closing coming up in two hours, the crews have to be ready. Things that can only be done when there are no cars passing by will have to be done by morning.

In the upcoming 10 hours, his workers will have to:

Pour the concrete for the center piers supports of the new Emerson Street bridge in the Narrows;

Clean up the concrete face of the Washington Street bridge;

Repair potholes in the mainline of the freeway;

Move concrete barriers near Logan and Downing streets for two lane shifts, and lay down new white lane markings - burning off the old ones.

Those are just the tasks that require highway closure to do. Other night work is off the mainline.

Cooke says he was a wizard with a motor grader when he was a grunt. He helped build airport runways, worked projects in Alaska, and worked for Kiewit on its recent I-15 rebuilding in Salt Lake City and on the San Joaquin Hills toll road in Orange County, Calif.

As the men huddle around the truck, a brilliant cloud-filled sunset over the Front Range belies a clear and warm night approaching in the city. It will be a good night for work.

Dennis Schroeder © News Bruce Wayne McCune crawls under a wrecked truck on northbound I-25 near the Evans off-ramp to hook up tow chains, as Karon Howard picks up debris from the accident. Both are tow-truck drivers for the T-REX courtesy patrol, which helps motorists with flat tires, empty gas tanks or disabled vehicles along the construction route, free of charge. All photography »

7:40 p.m.

A white pickup truck slams into the collapsible barrier at the northbound Evans Avenue off-ramp of I-25. The impact destroys all four foam-filled padded containers and their metal frames.

The exit remains closed while the T-REX courtesy patrol cleans up the debris and pulls the truck up on a flatbed trailer.

"It's just people in a hurry," Cooke says. "They don't pay attention."

7:42 p.m.

As the moon rises, finish foreman Saucedo relaxes and praises the workers who have shaped the mud into a graceful concrete bank.

Most of them travel as a team through road projects in Utah, California, Idaho and Nevada. The work is easier, Saucedo says, when you trust each other like they do.

On weekends, Saucedo loads his wife and five children into the family Suburban and gives them a tour of his team's work for the week. Workdays, he explains, often last 10 to 15 hours.

"Sometimes the kids don't see the dad, and they wonder what the dad does for a living," he says. "I show them what I do."

8:20 p.m.

At the Evans Field Office, Lloyd Maier takes a final look at the checklist for tonight's full-freeway closing, scheduled for 9 p.m.

Maier, 33, is night superintendent for traffic control. He leaves the Evans office to supervise the closing from the south end, at Hampden Avenue. He worries about drivers who might jump the cone barriers once they're in place.

"If one person runs the closure, they'll all end up doing it," Maier says. During the closing a couple of nights ago, two drunk drivers went through the barriers.

8:38 p.m.

After going south on I-25 to northbound I-225, then turning around at the DTC Boulevard interchange, Maier finds himself caught in a traffic jam of his own making.

On northbound I-25 at Quincy Avenue, one of his crew's cone-setting trucks has lighted arrows directing traffic to move right as workers drop cones down the left lane.

Past the Hampden off-ramp, the vehicles zoom past the last cone and spread out again on all lanes of the freeway northbound.

A second truck waits farther south, parked in the left lane behind the cones. Maier gets over to the left and, with his orange roof blinker flashing brightly, maneuvers between cones to join his crews in the closed left lane.

Pointing to the truck farther south, driven by Scott Toombs, Maier explains the rolling slowdown method for closing the highway.

Because freeway traffic, even at one lane, continues to zoom by in a tight pack, Toombs will have to force his way into the flow and then slow down. With only one lane open and no passing, he'll create a big gap in traffic.

It will allow Mark Stevens, 36, of Fort Lupton, driving the second truck poised at the Hampden off-ramp, to lay down the last few cones required to close off the right lane and force the rest of the traffic off the highway at Hampden.

Giving the word to start the final closing at Hampden, Maier looks back and sees Toombs' truck, about a quarter-mile back, trying to cut into the line of traffic.

"They won't let him in because they know what's going to happen," Maier says. Finally, a motorist gives Toombs the break he needs. He eases into the lane, slows to a crawl and lets the rest of the traffic ahead of him clear.

Vehicles begin to pile up behind him, led by the motorist who let him in line. When the last car to go up I-25 passes Stevens' truck at Hampden, Stevens pulls out slowly.

Enrique Montoya, 24, of Denver, places the final six cones from the back of the open truck.

Toombs' truck reaches the ramp and heads for the signal at Hampden, where he crosses over and completes the closing of the northbound on-ramp.

Montoya and Joe Green, 28, go to the shoulder of the ramp and pull out orange-and-white barriers that had been stored there. They set up three of them to stretch across the freeway. They read: "Road Closed."

Now it is.

Evan Semon © Special to the News Asa Britts, 24, of Salt Lake City, listens to a foreman as he helps smooth freshly poured concrete along 1-25 at University Boulevard. By the time T-REX is finished, the amount of concrete poured for the project would be enough to create a sidewalk 4 feet wide and 4 inches thick between Denver and Washington, D.C. All photography »

9:26 p.m.

A flatbed truck stops on a side street near the Park Meadows Mall. A man jumps from the cab, 17-inch biceps bulging under a white T-shirt and orange vest. He yanks a 20-pound detour sign from the truck bed, slams it into the ground and hops back inside in less than 15 seconds.

Every 500 feet, he does it again, until he's staked a detour route around and through the mall.

Later tonight, workers will raise concrete girders for the light-rail overpass along I-25 above County Line Road, which runs past the mall. Before they can, though, Roberto Bravo and Zac Walsh have to seal off the road.

Behind the wheel is Bravo, driving at 10 mph. In the back, in a steel basket called "the cage," Walsh plucks cones from a long stack and drops them onto the street. It's a four-count rhythm: One, two, three, cone.

Walsh, a square-jawed ex-Marine who bench presses 350 pounds, describes another worker who swings the cones in high arcs, over his head, then plants them straight down on the road. Walsh has only done this for two months. He's not ready for the straight plant.

So he dangles the cones at a slight angle, letting them hit a little before the target spot and slide into place.

"There's a little bit of an art to it," Walsh says. "You can't have cones falling over."

Behind the truck, a perfectly spaced orange line gradually crosses the road, funneling cars onto the detour, which doesn't make the following drivers happy. Several try to slip past the cones and the "Road Closed" barricade that Walsh and Bravo have laid behind them.

Motorists often flip the finger at the workers or curse them, Walsh says. Some curse them, then ask for directions. He says he rarely yells back because he understands.

Walsh slings cones and signs 40 hours a week, in addition to 17 hours of courses at the University of Denver, where he studies English and philosophy. He's a senior.

He doesn't mind the dirt billowing up through the cage, or the late hours. He likes the workout. He likes not having to think much.

"I get enough thinking during the day," he says.

9:45 p.m.

Engineer Brian Armstrong is up on a lift with foreman Roberto Gomez, inspecting the pier forms for the center support of the new Emerson Street bridge.

Concrete trucks are supposed to arrive soon from the batch plant at Santa Fe Drive and Mississippi Avenue, but something is wrong. The heavy green steel rebar cage that will reinforce the column is touching the form into which the concrete will be poured. That's not up to code.

Spacer wheels that will force the cage into centering within the form are brought up to the lift, and Gomez climbs down inside the tall and hollow pier form to place them.

9:58 p.m.

A noise complaint - T-REX's first in 21/2 weeks - is called in from a house on Dexter Street near Warren Avenue. It is a half-block from the noisy excavation along I-25's southbound shoulder, where a huge track hoe dumps tremendous scoops of dirt into haul trucks.

A couple in their 70s, who don't want to be identified, phoned in the complaint. "It's not so bad right now," says the woman, standing behind her storm door. "But it's when they go up to 2:30 in the morning. Sometimes it just goes too late."

Even though the complaint is being handled with diplomacy, Ryan Allen of the noise-monitoring unit still must go through his procedures.

He sets up a noise-recording device at the edge of the sidewalk outside the couple's home and prepares to measure the next 20 minutes' worth of noise.

Allen notes on his record anything making a noise that isn't related to T-REX.

But at one point, a loud sustained sound like a motorcycle is heard out on the highway. It comes from a haul truck leaving with a full load of dirt. The driver has applied his Jake brakes, a loud braking system that uses highly compressed air released from the diesel engine. That's a no-no.

The T-REX noise variance allows the project to emit an average nighttime level of 75 decibels, with a "spike" event - the loudest allowable single noise - at 86 decibels.

By 10:30 p.m., Ryan Allen's noise reading in front of the house on Dexter Street is done. It shows no violation of the noise variance, with a 20-minute average noise level at the couple's property line of 53.4 decibels and a "peak" event - the truck using its Jake brakes - of 69.9.

11:10 p.m.

Two concrete trucks are standing by, churning their loads and backing up to a concrete pumper, waiting for the problem with the reinforcing steel to be solved at the Emerson Street bridge piers.

Engineer Armstrong climbs down into the third pier, the one giving them problems, to take a look. Foreman Gomez climbs down into the middle pier form to check the rebar there.

Juan Simental is ready at the concrete pumper. He has a wireless control panel at waist level, strapped around his neck, from which he will maneuver the long, elephant-like snout of the pumper unit.

While waiting, Simental blows old concrete out of the system and onto a waste pile near the piers. It looks like Dumbo with a bad cold.

Finally, fresh concrete begins to spew out of the snout, with Armstrong and Gomez guiding it into the pier form that had been so troublesome.

11:40 p.m.

Jason Greathouse of Delta, Utah, is a K-rail picker. He operates a tractor that has an attachment made to grab those heavy concrete barriers that mark the lanes, lift them up and move them elsewhere.

His ground man is Dimitry Novikoff, of San Francisco. They are moving the barriers for the Logan Street traffic shift, with Greathouse plucking them up and Novikoff swinging them around to their new locations. Dealing with the K-rails is dangerous work - a 20-foot barrier weighs 7,300 pounds, while the 12-foot "stick" weighs about 5,300 pounds.

11:50 p.m.

Old I-25 is being stripped off quickly at University Boulevard. Tony Hagood, 53, of Denver, is foreman of the crew that is running an asphalt-milling machine in the former southbound lanes.

The huge machine is set to chew off nine inches on each pass, spewing the ground-up asphalt into waiting dump trucks. The millings are hauled a short distance to the University interchange, where a stockpile is maintained for recycling.

"It's real easy because this asphalt is old," Hagood says.

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