By Jim Hunt for the News and Journal
As you travel the streets and highways throughout Central West Virginia, I doubt you could find one person who would say that this summer has been a great experience.
Almost any direction you drive, it seems you are staring at a worker in an orange vest, holding a stop sign and directing drivers around heavy equipment or deep ditches being excavated. Utility replacement, bridge repairs and construction of extra lanes are but a few of the projects underway in our area.
One of the largest projects is the replacement of water, sewer and gas lines throughout the city of Clarksburg. It is a $90 million dollar project that is unearthing decades old pipe that has far outlived its usefulness and replacing it with thousands of feet of new pipe that hopefully will last for many decades in the future. Cities and towns across the country have been dealing with aging infrastructure for many years and these types of projects are often complicated and require coordination from multiple agencies and utilities. In Clarksburg’s case, the sewer board and the gas company were also dealing with aged pipes and took the opportunity to coordinate with the city to address all these projects together.
While the streets have been torn up for quite a while, I must admit that I have not been held up more than a few minutes as I head to town. The traffic control people have been out in withering heat and heavy rain and generally smile as they move you on your way.
And this work is extremely dangerous. Workers are in ditches as backhoes swing their buckets inches away from their heads. I don’t envy any of the legion of workers who spend their time on these dangerous construction jobs.
I’ve heard and seen a lot of comments about these construction projects, and it makes me wonder how the complainers would go about upgrading these pipes. Some people have suggested working at night or doing the streets, one at a time. I guess these people have never heard jackhammers at 3:00AM and would be quite happy to have these massive pieces of equipment in our city for the next ten years. Replacing worn out utilities takes time and there are few alternatives to having noisy, dusty and bumpy streets as we upgrade our infrastructure. Unfortunately, progress involves inconvenience, and it is never a fast process.
Recently, I was driving up Interstate 79 and dreading getting to the area around Fairmont where they are expanding the lanes and working on some massive bridges.
As I braced myself to endure the lane changes and narrow areas, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had nearly completed the entire job. Fresh blacktop and newly painted lines with nary an orange cone to be seen. And it was fabulous! The expansion allows for an uninterrupted drive to Morgantown and I’m sure that Mountaineer fans will praise the work when the first home football game welcomes thousands of cars traveling through our area.
As someone who travels throughout the country, I realize that we have an old country with some old pipes and roads. If we just keep patching and filling potholes, we are living in the past. Imagine going back fifty years and driving on narrow country roads, taking hours longer to get anywhere. I remember when driving to Charleston was a four-hour excursion, in sticky, hot cars with tires that flattened like pancakes as they hit an acre long pothole.
A closing word of caution: Drive carefully in construction zones and pay attention to the workers who are making our lives better. They are not the problem; they are the solution!
