death by paver segregation

Last week two of my coworkers were killed while patching potholes on a major highway (Denver Post Article here). I really didn't know the guys, but it still bums me out. Hell, the entire Department of Transportation is saddened.

This tragedy has heightened my paranoia of field trips. Yesterday (and you wonder why I didn't post anything) I was out classifying pavement cracks on various highways and I couldn't stop thinking about how the next 70-MPH vehicle might weave a bit and splatter my fragile body across three lanes of concrete highway. Fucking scary. Yeah, I wear a hardhat and a safety vest, but what the fuck is that going to do against 5,000-lbs of speeding steel? Not a damn thing.

So guess what I've been asked to do today? I've been asked to go on another field trip. This time to Interstate 25 and 84th Avenue, which is the exact spot my coworkers were killed. I'm supposed to take pictures of the far left lane… the fast lane. I'm not taking forensic photos. I'm taking pictures of cracks so that some asshole upstairs can claim that paver segregation (a type of asphalt surface distress) is killing our workforce. I feel like someone is trying to capitalize off of this tragedy by incorporating it into a totally unrelated subject matter. Paver segregation did not kill those two coworkers/fathers/husbands; a drunk driver killed them.

At any rate, I'm a bit jittery today. I have to leave in half an hour. Hopefully, I'll be back. If not, chalk up another death to that nefarious paver segregation.
...and so it was written, shenry at 6/10/2004 08:28:00 AM.
...and so it was appended with .