Helping area grow, putting it to work
Vulcan Materials official delivers the concrete to build up the region
Lou Rao sees all the new development in Baltimore and swells with pride.
The Perry Hall resident is the district operations manager for Vulcan Materials Co., which supplies concrete and cement for buildings, bridges and other projects. The company, based in Birmingham, Ala., has 29 facilities between Baltimore and Richmond, Va.
“We’re revitalizing areas all around Baltimore,” Rao said. “It’s real neat to be a part of that . ... We can keep people working, off the unemployment rolls and reinvesting in our city.”
Rao oversees production for the company’s four ready-mix plants in the Baltimore area. That involves balancing a schedule of 40 truckers hauling four to six loads a day to job sites around the area. The shipments must meet the needs of each project, such as a certain number of yards or loads per hour, or a particular mix of concrete, based on strength or temperature.
Rao started at Vulcan as a truck driver in 1994 and was promoted successively to plant manager, dispatch manager and production manager. “Somebody seen something they liked,” he said with a laugh.
Vulcan’s materials, sourced from a quarry in Havre de Grace and the Lehigh Cement Co. in Baltimore, are used for commercial and residential buildings, he said. Its concrete was used to build the Brown Center at the Maryland Institute College of Art on Mount Royal Avenue, the Hilton Baltimore on Pratt Street and the Baltimore Convention Center, among other projects around the city, Rao said.
The 28-story, mixed-use building under construction at 1 Light Street in the Inner Harbor is using Vulcan materials, as are a couple of ongoing wastewater treatment facility projects, he said.
When the port of Baltimore needed to expand the pier berth at the Dundalk Marine Terminal, Vulcan poured the concrete for a new bulkhead, Rao said.
Rao was born and raised in Dundalk. Having grown up in a neighborhood of Bethlehem Steel workers, he said he’s proud to work for a company that employs a few hundred people doing similar industrial work in Baltimore.
“All us here are local,” he said. “Everything we pay our employees stays in our city.”