It's after midnight, and danger looms on the Baltimore Beltway.
Tons of steel dangle from cables under a glaring spotlight. Ironworkers glide precariously atop girders 40 feet up, squinting to determine whether that shadow across the way is man or machine. Cars fly by inches away at 60-plus mph.
The workers building a new bridge over Interstate 695 at Reisterstown Road can't see too well at 2 a.m., and drivers probably aren't faring much better.
Yet in a nod to the power of traffic, to irritable motorists and to the miles of backups that would result if the work were done during the day, most major roadwork is being done in the middle of the night.
Ninety percent of interstate repairs and nearly 50 percent of primary road work are done at night, according to the State Highway Administration. With traffic growing year after year, the agency has little choice, said spokeswoman Valerie Burnette Edgar.
"We just could not have miles and miles of backups on our roads," she said. "It was the only option."
For motorists, that's a blessing. By the time most drivers hit the road for their morning commute, workers have cleaned up and cleared out.
For the road crews, too, there are advantages. In summer, they escape the worst heat. And the red-eye shift pays more.
Otherwise, it requires a major adjustment to their body clocks, and their work becomes more complex and more hazardous. Most work the 8 p.m.-to-4 a.m. shift once or twice a month.
On this May night, John Schaeffer, 35, and a half-dozen other Local 16 ironworkers from Genesis Steel Corp. will help raise and bolt together several 20-ton, gray steel beams, the bones of a new bridge.
Schaeffer had tried to sleep that afternoon, but it was useless. He mowed the lawn at his Essex home, washed his car, bought groceries, and at the end of the day arrived eyes wide open for his overnight job.
"There's no preparing for it," he says. "I'll just sleep all day tomorrow."
State police are there to halt traffic on the outer loop of the Beltway while a 150-ton crane anchored in the median gingerly lifts each girder into place, and the crews secure them. But they can't afford to close the Beltway for long.
"We've got 15 minutes to pick up the girder and set it ... [and] stick in 100-some bolts," said Schaeffer, who will make $23.78 an hour.
The crew is allowed to close the highway for 15-minute intervals. After time is up, they must open the road and wait until traffic clears before closing for another interval.
Of course, bright floodlights help. But working in long shadows, sorting barrels of fist-size bolts, shoving them through scores of perforations and securing them with a 40-pound impact wrench isn't nearly as easy after the sun goes down.
"The most difficult part is seeing," says Tony Stempl, the Genesis supervisor. "It's like putting a puzzle together. Being able to see all that is critical."
Finding your footing in the dark while balancing on girders high in the air can be a bit dicey, too, even if you're wearing a safety harness. But none of it compares to the hazard posed by motorists.
"The job is dangerous itself," said Schaeffer, who has worked projects at the Bay Bridge and Ravens stadium. "And working nights is more dangerous with the traffic. I'm not worried about myself, so much. I worry more about the guys on the ground."
He slips a pack of cigarettes up under the webbing of his hardhat.
"You stick around here all night, watch out."
Growing traffic
The original bridge went up in 1961 and has never been widened or rebuilt. Traffic has grown from 8,700 cars a day to more than 44,000, and it's expected to grow another 40 percent in the next 20 years.
The crew's task is to set the steel for the new bridge - a wider structure designed to permit traffic to move more smoothly.
The old bridge cost $411,000. By the time this one is finished in August, it will cost $14 million.
The term "road rage" hadn't been coined in 1961. Now there are impatient motorists who take out their frustrations on road crews with bizarre outbursts, flinging shoes or obscenities as they inch past.
Stempl says an irate motorist once threw a six-pack of Pepsi at him. He can laugh about it because it missed.
The real danger at night is out-of-control vehicles.
"At night, you get people leaving bars and falling asleep behind the wheel," says Stempl. Some doze off while stopped in traffic, adding wake-up service to the crew's duties. And no driver's vision is as good at night.
More accidents
Mostly because of the overall boom in highway projects, work-zone accidents have grown. In Maryland last year there were 2,726, compared with 2,030 in 1998. Most occurred in heavier daytime traffic, but about one-third were night accidents. More than 1,000 people were injured and 15 killed last year, most of them motorists.
To blunt the trend, highway officials have launched a safety campaign, with radio and television spots urging drivers to stay alert and slow down near work zones.
