As Tropical Storm Gordon in mid-September churned across Florida and northward along the East Coast, a C.C, Mangum Contractors crew worked quickly to beat the oncoming rain.
The work project is a simple one as road construction goes: the addition of two traffic lanes and a turn lane along 4,600 ft. (1,395 m) of Buffaloe Road on the east edge of Raleigh, NC.
Two conditions are making the project less than routine: weather and underground utilities.
The region experienced a cool and wet summer, which was nice for ducks and office workers. It was not ideal for building contractors.
Not till late August had official thermometers recorded a 100-degree day, and few three-digit days followed the rest of the summer. The cool meteorological conditions produced more rainy days than usual — and more challenges for people like Mark Gramling.
Gramling is in charge of public works and operations at Mangum Contractors, a 73-year-old Raleigh firm.
Though the Buffaloe Road contract doesn’t call for completion till early summer 2001, one fifth of the project’s first 75 days were rendered unproductive by the rainfall.
That rate of delay can make superintendents a little antsy, particularly in the southeastern United States during hurricane season.
And those early rainouts were added to in mid-September when Tropical Storm Gordon’s wide-ranging cloud front passed over Raleigh, 200 mi. from the storm’s center.
Mangum crews hustled that morning to dump, spread and pack truckloads of fill dirt on the broadened shoulders of Buffaloe Road before rains reached them at midday.
The other impediment to swift progress on the project is an array of underground utilities. They serve existing residential neighborhoods, as well as several new subdivisions rising quickly in the fast-growing state capital.
“At four critical locations, we encountered utilities in the way,” Gramling said, which included storm drainage lines, natural gas lines and telephone lines. “Multiple problems,” Gramling called them.
“It’s almost like you can’t just go out and build a road anymore,” he said. “There is so much stuff in the ground now, and that’s where we do our work.”
On the morning of the tropical storm’s approach, city of Raleigh inspectors were at the site to see what progress was being made.
They watched as Public Service crews worked to locate and realign a gas line. A cairn of sandrock was piled high in tribute to the hole and to the tough backhoe digging that produced it.
Nearby, a BellSouth subcontractor out of Charlotte, Ansco and Associates, had a foreman and laborer carefully sifting earth on the roadside using a John Deere 310E backhoe with a narrow bucket.
The two-man crew had been at the site for a month at that point but was battling rock and rainfall to lower BellSouth’s fiber optic and conventional lines as much as 3 and 4 ft. (.9 and 1.2 m) in places.
However, the main activity was across busy Buffaloe Road. There another subcontractor, Puryear Transport of Raleigh, was carting in tons of fill dirt to raise the overall grade of the shoulder.
The trucks transported fill material from two sites. A pair of the tandem vehicles were being loaded just 100 yards away by a Gradall XL4100.
The Gradall precisely shaped an embankment next to Buffaloe Road, dumping buckets full of the skimmed earth into the Puryear trucks. About 4,000 cu. yds. (3,040 cu m) of material was moved this way, from place to place on site, just to balance out project needs.
The rest of the dirt, another 5,000 cu. yds. (3,800 cu m), was trucked to the site from a Wake Stone Corporation quarry several miles away in nearby Knightdale. It is one of two Wake Stone quarries in the area.
As the morning wore on, a stream of Puryear trucks rumbled onto the Buffaloe Road fill site under the storm’s lowering clouds, quickly dumping their loads and roaring away for more.
There was not a huge piece of equipment on site this day, the Gradall being the largest. That’s by design. Gramling said equipment was “down-scaled” to match the scope of the project.
“You won’t see a lot of heavy equipment on that job,” he said. “It is relatively tight work between the boundaries of the right of way and the traffic. We put equipment in there to scale.”
For instance, the equipment operator leveling the dumped soil is using a maneuverable but relatively small Komatsu D39P tracked dozer that nimbly spreads the dirt with its blade and keeps out of the way of the lumbering trucks.
The bigger, heavier machine working at the site is an Ingersoll-Rand Pro-Pac Series 100 roller that compresses the relocated soil.
Eventually, after the site has been trenched, shaped and pounded into submission, a stone base will be formed and the new asphalt lanes laid.
One of Mangum’s Blaw-Knox or Cedarapids asphalt pavers will be used to pave the new roadway, Gramling said. The bituminous material for the pavers will be trucked to the site from one of the company’s own asphalt plants set up adjacent to the Wake Stone quarry,
Mangum traces its history from 1927 when Cleve C. Mangum started an earth-moving business with two drag pans and two pair of mules.
Today, a fourth-generation member of the family, Michael Mangum, is president of the firm.
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