Officials focus on safety for road crews
TULSA — Ninth-grade physics lessons become very real during the back-breaking labor of highway maintenance. At times, that back-breaking labor is literal.
Jerry Ragsdale, an Oklahoma Department of Transportation maintenance worker, was catapulted from a bucket truck about four years ago after a driver struck his vehicle.
“Every day, we go to work zones,” Ragsdale said. “At the end of the day, we just want to go home.”
Ragsdale was working on a U.S. 412 sign when the driver hit the bucket truck, he said. That driver had had a heart attack. The wreck broke Ragsdale’s right foot, right hand, left knee and the bones in his lower leg. It twisted his left foot from the socket. He said the foot was pointing “the other way” when he stood up.
The force of the collision “catapulted” Ragsdale. He shared his story Friday to promote work zone awareness, an effort the Transportation Department will promote throughout April. Force, for the laymen, is the mass of an object multiplied by its acceleration.
Just about every major thoroughfare in Tulsa is under a construction project. The work coincides with traffic. Maintenance workers and contract workers work alongside that traffic.
Ragsdale’s injuries put him off the job for about a year. The silver lining to his recovery was his then6-year-old grandchild coming to take care of him.
Officials put up signage, striping and alert media to the projects. But those efforts to change physics: A yellow vest and orange cone won’t stop a 2-ton pickup truck.
“There are a lot of signs up, a lot of lane closures and restrictions,” said Randle White, an ODOT division engineer. “We’re wanting to emphasize for the public to not lose the message ‘be safe in a work zone.’”
A reportedly distracted driver struck and killed a Transportation Department superintendent in May 2016 in Delaware County. The crew and prison inmates were cleaning up brush from State Highway 20. In 2011, a worker was killed while working along U.S. 75 south of Bartlesville.
Another contract worker was picking up litter in February 2017 in the area of U.S. 169 and I-244 when a truck struck him and fled the area.
Robert Butler, a maintenance worker, said working alongside the highway is frightening and dangerous.
“It not something for the faint of heart,” he said.
Butler has been at it for more than a decade. He keeps a prayer card in his wallet for one of the workers who was killed, Joshua Van Isom McCance.
In 2007, McCance was filling potholes on the Broken Arrow Expressway, near the Houston Avenue exit downtown, when a driver struck and killed him. The prayer card Butler carries features McCance’s name and a prayer to St. Joseph. The driver that struck McCance was accused of manslaughter and eventually pleaded guilty to that charge.
State officials said they want to remind drivers to leave plenty of room between vehicles, keep traveling speeds in check, to remain alert and to stay off of electronic devices. Those state officials stressed those points in particular for drivers traveling through work zones.
State troopers know to keep alert for those traffic infractions when the Transportation Department announces new construction, Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Dwight Durant said.
“Each trooper has discretion,” Durant said. “But in construction zones, myself, I lower my discretion.”
State officials addressed the issue of work zone safety just ahead of a $1.6 million project to repair eastbound and westbound lanes of the Broken Arrow Expressway bridge over Sheridan Road.
In Tulsa, Interstate 244, U.S. 169, the Broken Arrow Expressway, U.S. 75 and the Inner Dispersal Loop are some of the areas affected by road mending.
For about two decades, the Transportation Department has received flat funding, White said, forcing officials to be more reactionary to road maintenance. White said that trend is reversing and, with funding on hand, they “need to address the project.” A lot of the projects — which can involve property rights, utility relocation, funding issues and environmental concerns — are coalescing, it seems, at once.