The airport serving the Raleigh-Durham, NC, area is sprawled on acreage between two east-west highways that funnel traffic to it and past it. Interstate 40 on the south and NC Hwy. 70 on the north are clogged with vehicles at least twice a day
Hundreds of those that veer off the main flow of traffic enter airport authority property and go … where? Some, of course, drop off or pick up passengers of airlines that fly planes in and out of the airport.
The rest have to be parked somewhere, and that’s why a Nello L. Teer Company crew is clearing 13.6 hectares (34 acres) just inside the airport grounds. The company is building another park-and-ride area for employee and long-term visitors.
Beginning in mid-March, Teer employees and subcontractors began to clear a rolling wooded area abutting an existing parking lot. Typical for North Carolina, the construction area was covered with forest, mostly one variety of pine or another but some deciduous as well.
The trees were gone by the end of April and Teer’s heavy equipment roamed the tops of the deeply rolling topography previously hidden by the forest. The task: flatten the area by moving an estimated 129,200 cubic meters (170,000 cu. yds.) of dirt.
By early May, the project began to take shape. The company’s Caterpillar equipment had begun to change the lay of the land.
Under welcome May sunshine marking the end of a week of rain delay, a Cat D8 earthmover eased up to the rear push bumper of a Cat 621 scraper and together the machines skimmed another few tons of subsoil from an area just adjacent to the existing lot’s paved area. A Cat 140 grader shaped the edges of the work area.
That the machines’ operators looked down from their work on the existing lot’s pavement told the story: A final grade had not been reached.
Teer has four of the 621s on the job. The big rubber-tired machines hauled the first loads of excess soil to an area across an entranceway road to adjacent airport property. Only later would the heavy equipment push and haul the dirt down the hill they were cutting away and begin to fill the gullies that cut through the work zone.
Some 90 meters away working at about the same elevation, a Caterpillar 350 excavator swung loads of topsoil into the beds of tandem and all-terrain trucks. A D6 push-piled the soil within reach of the excavators arm.
Teer has four Kenworth tandem trucks on the job and two Volvo A25 off-road trucks. The other tandems hauling the soil were operated by a subcontractor, Mayo Farms Inc. of Durham.
All of this off-site hauling across the existing parking lot’s entrance road was closely flagged by Teer crews. The chief priority besides safety was to keep cars and pickups moving smoothly in and out of the lot.
Teer operations manager John Couture explained the politics of the situation.
“We cannot disturb the parking lot activity,” Couture said. “The airport authority is extremely sensitive to revenue collection and operation of the lot.”
What Couture didn’t say is that this parking construction project — and others at the airport expected to be bid on in 2001 — comes on the heels of an embarrassing delay in a major high-rise parking project. That complex is rising a few miles away, just across the street from the airport’s main terminals. It was still uncompleted this spring, a year after it was contracted to be fully open.
So as critical as the need for the new parking lot itself is the need for Teer to ensure that airport employees and long-term customers have ready access to the old lot.
The $10.4-million job is broken into three phases. In the first, Teer has until November to smooth and pave the area, effectively doubling the capacity of parking to 4,000 spaces from 2,000.
A new entranceway for shuttle buses also is being constructed. It leaves the entrance roadway about 45 meters (50 yds.) from the lot, cuts behind an emergency services building and connects with the new parking area.
The second and third phases of the project begin in early January next year when Teer will move parking onto the brand new asphalted area and start rehabilitating the old one. That work will include new surfacing, a new toll booth and a bus shelter. T&H Electrical Corp. of Wilson, NC, will do signs and signals for the job and Phase 3 Electric of Raleigh will provide the rest of the electricity work.
What this schedule means is that from sometime in November through the year-end holidays, the airport authority will have temporary use of all 4,000 parking spaces. The contractor specifically is prohibited from doing any work that will disrupt parking during that busy time of the year, Couture said.
The last phases of the project are to be completed in November 2001.
Not totally unexpected was the discovery of some wetlands off the edge of the existing lot. A depression leading from the lot ended in a swale of 1.2 hectares (3 acres) that was threatened by the construction.
General superintendent Steve Gallivan said the discovery necessarily revised some plans. Mitigation talks followed, which led to a swapping of the area with another nearby so the total wetlands amount was preserved The 13.6-hectare (33.5 acre) job site includes two retaining basins on its lower end.
Though the rolling hills now being leveled appear to be yielding easily to scrapers, Couture said engineers expect the crews to encounter some rock. What the powerful Cat equipment can’t rip up and move, a Wake Forest, NC, subcontractor, East Coast Drilling, “We are looking for ways to minimize the blasting,” Couture said.
When the ground finally is at grade and packed tight by Cat 815 rollers, Teer crews will bring in an estimated 54,000 metric tons (60,000 tons) of aggregate base. A Raleigh firm, Wake Stone, will provide the material.
Atop the stone will be laid 22,500 metric tons (25,000 tons) of asphalt. The asphalt will be provided by one of Teer’s five plants. Those plants are located near Roxboro (north of Durham), Durham, Holly Springs, Carrboro and Raleigh.
The asphalt plants are an asset to the company itself, of course, but also are independent revenue-producers. Other paving companies contract with them for the paving material. Some public agencies also do in smaller quantities.
That this airport project will be completed mostly by Teer employees using Teer-owned equipment is a characteristic of the company.
Couture, 43, and Gallivan, 38, each have 20 years of experience in the industry. They understand the value of working for a heavy hauling and site construction company that does most of the work inhouse.
“Most of the people we work with like the fact that we can do that,” Couture said. “We do everything, outside of buildings.”
The ticklishness of working in a sensitive political environment is made somewhat easier by the company’s broad capacity to get a job done. “We can control our own schedule,” said Gallivan. “When we can self-perform and provide the whole gamut of work needed, we can deal with [tight schedules] a lot better.”
Nello L. Teer Company has been moving dirt since 1909 and has today what Couture calls “a good mixture of private and public work.”
Current projects include street construction in rapidly-growing Raleigh, work in hi-tech job-generating Research Triangle Park, and site preparation at a business park adjacent to the capital city’s new entertainment and sports center.
Couture hopes Teer will win contracts later this year for one or two more parking lot projects at the airport.
The company still has an equipment shop and yard in Durham, where it began in business 91 years ago, but its corporate headquarters is just across I-40 from the parking lot project in a building in little Morrisville.
The town won’t be little long. The whole area surrounding the airport — Raleigh, Cary, Morrisville, Research Triangle Park — is booming and filling up. That is relevant because though Teer has world-wide business links, it has refocused its work on a 160-kilometer (100 mi.) radius of Durham.
Why? Because working farther from the home base is unnecessary, said Couture. “There is enough work here.”
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