Dan's Papers - June 22, 2007

We've got a problem with the Bi-County Construction company. In November of 2006, they won a contract to build a little 500-foot-long eastbound onramp from St. Andrews Road to County Road 39 in Southampton. For some reason, when the original section of the road where these two roads cross was built back in the 1960s, they left one of the onramps out, the eastbound one. No big deal. As I understand it, the job was supposed to take five months.

That was a good thing. Because in April of 2006, Suffolk County had stumbled upon a very effective system of dealing with the huge traffic back up that goes eastbound along County Road 39 from March to December every year. This system, called the "Cops and Cones program," had been in place for the seven months before Bi-County came. The system solved the problem. Every weekday, at 6 am, the cops would go out there and put down traffic cones on County Road 39 to make a temporary second eastbound lane. Then at 9 am, they would come back and remove the cones. Traffic rolled. Problem solved. The plan was to finish up Cops and Cones just after Thanksgiving in 2006 and then come back in April of 2007. If Bi-County could build their little off-ramp during that interval, it would make Cops and Cones impossible to implement, but that would be fine. The morning rush hour traffic was not that bad during the wintertime.

In March of 2007, however, the job was nowhere near done. And the powers that be, alarmed, realized that with all the construction going on there stretching into April and May for who knows how long, they were not going to be able to begin the Cops and Cones anytime soon. Indeed, the traffic was building up again.

Bi-County was approached. Could they stop construction until fall? They'd HAVE to stop construction until fall. It would be a madhouse to not have the Cops and Cones in at least between Memorial Day and Labor Day. And so Bi-County agreed. Construction stopped, the cones went in and immediately the traffic began flowing again. And the Cops and Cones will be out there until Labor Day.

But what then? Bi-County, it was agreed, would be back. But for the day after Labor Day? That's only 90 days away. The fall was almost as important as the summer. The County would have to come up with something for the fall. Or there would be another madhouse.

This week, our New York State Assemblyman Fred Thiele made an appeal to the Long Island Railroad. Put more trains into service for the East End in the fall. We've got to lower the number of cars on the road. At least until the work on the onramp is done. If the railroad could put more trains coming out to the Hamptons right after Labor Day, the County and Towns would meet the trains with a new shuttle bus system that would get the people from the train stations to where they had to go. And who knew how long that would last. Bi-County was now saying that they could perhaps be done by Memorial Day of 2008. Maybe.

Well, all of these developments have got me to thinking of a man in the construction business named C. C. Myers of Sacramento, California. He is 46 years old, six foot six, wears cowboy boots that make him look six nine, and is a man who knows how to put a construction project on a fast track.

I fly to San Francisco with some frequency to see my daughter. As you know, San Francisco sits on one side of a bay. And Oakland sits on the other. A single bridge more than two miles long connects them, and on both ends there are huge onramps and offramps where the traffic funnels onto the bridge. Back in April, a man driving an oil truck lost control of his vehicle, which went into a spin, hit an abutment and exploded. Amazingly, the driver managed to escape without serious injury, but an entire overpass above the abutment came loose and crashed down on top of the truck, which smashed through an elevated underpass below. Traffic came to a complete halt. It was a big mess.

After looking it over and taking everything into account, Governor Schwartzeneger announced on television that it would probably take about seven months to get everything cleaned up and the new overpasses built. In the meantime, detours would lead people around to other onramps, but the delays would probably cost at least an hour, maybe even two hours, extra for any commuters using the bridge. The cost in lost business would be in the billions. It would be a terrible blow for the community.

It was no big deal to find the plans for the overpasses, nor was it a big deal to design them to be more beefed up so it would, hopefully, never happen again. Ten days after the accident, the City of Oakland invited interested parties to come look at the plans and give estimates for the job before May 6. They were on a fast track. They wanted the job done by June 26, something that seemed almost impossible. But if the deadline of getting it done in just 50 days was achieved, there would be a half a million dollar bonus in it for the builder.

Three builders entered bids. One bid $6.9 million. Another bid $6.4 million. The firm of C. C. Myers bid $867,075. But there was a catch. For every day EARLIER than June 26, they asked for an additional bonus of $200,000 with the total not to exceed $5 million.

Who could resist such a bid? Newsmen reported that workmen from C. C. Myers Co. were at the scene just fifteen minutes after the papers were signed. Myers said that was a lot of bull. They were there fifteen minutes BEFORE the papers were signed.

Could a project that most people said could be done in not less than five months really be done in just 50 days? Myers and his men, working two twelve-hour shifts per day, seven days a week, got the job done and opened in just fifteen days! It is in operation today. And building inspectors, who were on the site in shifts around the clock for the whole 15 days say that it passed every inspection they put it through. It is stronger than it was before.

How did Myers do it? The main thing he did, he says, was make a contract with his 400 workmen, giving them a big cut of the bonus if they could make it happen. Another thing he did was contact a steel fabricating firm in Coolidge, Arizona headed up by a man named Carl Douglas, who had an inside line to steel companies in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Douglas and his men were cut in. And, according to Douglas, his trucks worked 24 hours a day going back and forth between Ohio and Arizona and California with three men on board so the wheels would never stop turning.

"This was no $850,000 job," Myers said after the smoke had cleared and he had literally thrashed the deadline. On the other hand, it was no $6.4 million job either. Having totaled out at a cost of $5.8 million, he said that he could get it done for less than six because the men were working so much faster.

Myers said he only made one mistake. He told a reporter in mid-May that he would have the overpass finished by Memorial Day. When it turned out that was exactly what was going to happen, Governor Schwartzeneger got up on a TV network and made the announcement.

"I should have kept my mouth shut," Myers said. "He got all the credit."

Then there was the ribbon cutting. Governor Schwartzeneger was there. But in boots that made him almost seven feet tall, so was C. C. Myers.

"I wanted to tower over him," Myers said. And he did.

The cost for building the onramp for County Road 39 is expected to be $9.5 million. But, of course, they will have been working on it for fifteen of the last eighteen months. I wonder what the financial damage to our community tops out at for eighteen months? And I wonder what it might cost if we had asked construction companies to insure it would be done in 50 days?