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To the Editor:

On January 13, 1982, Florida Flight 90 crashed into The Fourteenth Street Bridge. During the horrible, harrowing aftermath our Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) employees and government agencies worked with extreme dedication.

Four days after the crash, on January 17,1982, Charles S. “Chuck” Robb was inaugurated Governor of Virginia. The first thing he did was impose a three-month freeze on state hiring. I couldn’t believe he did that, but I was too busy with crash repairs to dwell on it.

Earlier in September 1979 I volunteered to become Resident Engineer A In Charge Of Maintenance in the Fairfax Residency which covered Fairfax and Arlington Counties. I was certain I could make things better.

Our October 1979 Snow Removal Dry Run revealed some snowplows that were in bad shape and too many chemical spreaders were still caked with salt and sand from the previous winter. We turned equipment maintenance around until three years later we ran a three-day snow removal operation with no equipment breakdowns.

Four barrels of a five-barrel box culvert were completely blocked by branches, rocks and red clay. One of our crews worked for two weeks with a bobcat loader, truck mounted crane with a clamshell bucket and three dump trucks to clean out that box culvert.

Prison Camp 30, our largest VDOT maintenance headquarters, and the Fairfax County landfill were located on West OX Road between Route 50 and Route 29. Several massive dead oak trees posed a threat to the traveling public and needed to be removed. I discovered a few convicts were experienced tree men. I admit VDOT did not authorize my removing two threatening dead trees from private property (with the homeowner’s eager permission).

It took two years of fairly consistent effort, but we cut down trees and bushes to clear an eight-foot swath behind the ditches on Route 495 (The Capital Beltway). Then we kept that swath mowed.

We installed hand-crank screw jacks on the hitches of our 2,000 gallon asphalt kettles. We installed heavy beam racks with chained hooks to hang our heavy dump truck tailgates when we slid our chemical spreaders into the dump beds.

The residency clerk I demoted was using a cardboard box as a footstool. Our new clerk discovered that box contained all of the information about the tractor trailer tanker that crashed into the Route 236 bridge over Route 495. The resulting conflagration caused over half million dollars damage to the bridge. So much time had passed we were only able to claim $275,000 from the trucker’s insurance company. That neglected cardboard box was the world’s most expensive footstool.

We desperately needed new typewriters. Records showed we had our full complement of 25, but I couldn’t find seven of them. My clerk and I finally found five machines. A phone call finally revealed two machines in the Typewriter Repair Shop in our Central Office in Richmond. They had been there since 1966 and 1967 (and this was in 1982). Most of our seven typewriters that went to auction at our Culpepper District Office did not sell and met their fate with a sledgehammer. Our secretaries were ecstatic over the seven brand new IBM Selectric II typewriters which had the correcting tape feature.

I have enough examples to fill a book. I’m sharing these few to show that government work is about serving the people. It has nothing to do with the profit motive. Much government work results in things that never happened and it’s almost impossible to prove a negative. The public didn’t realize the millions of dollars of equipment they paid for was now well maintained and that’s why things went a smoothly as they did. The traveling public never knew that Route 28 near Sterling never flooded because that five-barrel box culvert was kept cleaned out. A family was never crushed in their car by a dead tree that never fell on West Ox Road. Cars that skidded off of Route 495 never had their roofs torn off by trees that had been removed from the far side of the ditch. The public didn’t know we virtually eliminated the pain and workman’s compensation expenses from our employees severe back injuries which no long occurred. The public never knew what it took to for VDOT to be partially compensated for fire damage to that bridge. The public would have never guessed our VDOT office ran more efficiently because every typewriter worked. I could go on.

Then came Governor Robb’s hiring freeze. Due to competition from easier, safer and higher paying jobs, my two counties had the highest employee turnover in the State of Virginia. The three month hiring freeze turned into four, then five, then … Despite our best efforts we lost employees and couldn’t replace them.

It wasn’t just the loss of employees. Our Equipment Division “rented” equipment to us. Each Residency was required to use each piece of equipment a certain number of hours to justify having the equipment. Because of severely reduced manpower we couldn’t keep up the required hours of usage. Some of our motor graders, many dump trucks and tractor mowers were called back from Arlington and Fairfax counties by the Equipment Division. Our former equipment was reassigned to other Residencies to replace their older equipment which was being sold at auction. When we could hire new employees again I would not have equipment to assign them to. The only way for us to regain our former equipment level was for the Equipment Division to buy and provide us with all new equipment. The downward spiral in our capabilities was a maddening “catch 22.”

Among other things we couldn’t mow properly, and our intersections became overgrown. A teenage boy couldn’t see oncoming traffic but pulled his car through a median crossover. An oncoming car T-boned his car on the passenger’s side. I investigated immediately. I just couldn’t remove the petite, pink tennis shoe lying on the pavement between a set of angry, black skid marks. An innocent 16-year-old girl just died on that spot. I don’t often cry, but …

After that we mowed an intersection then lifted our mower blades and raced to the mow the next intersection. My boss didn’t like it, and the public raised hell, but it was the best we could do. There couldn’t be any more pink tennis shoes!

As our manpower shortage got worse, we found many creative ways to make do with less. But by January 1983, after full year of Governor Robb’s hiring freeze, we had 163 people to do the work of 275. It was no longer physically possible.

Mac McDaniel, Maintenance Supervisor at our maintenance headquarters next to The Naval Annex called me. He said, “Mr. John. There’s me, my maintenance superintendent, my foreman and on truck driver left. What should I do?”

I said, “Mac, find the thing that’s most likely to be fatal and fix it.”

He asked, “What should I do after that?”

I said, “Find the next thing that’s likely to be fatal and fix that. Then go home at the end of the day and don’t worry about it. You can’t win!”
Mac and his three other men were the only ones left to maintain the Interstate and Primary Roads in Arlington County.

We routinely hired some private dump trucks and drivers to help us during snow removal. The private operators would attach our plows and slide our chemical spreaders into the beds of their trucks. But there were always a lot of new truck drivers who never plowed snow before. How was this going to work with just one state plow operator and a bunch of inexperienced drivers plowing snow on the Interstate and primary roads in Arlington County? We were one snow storm away from disaster!

In desperation I requested permission to talk to Governor Robb, but I was absolutely forbidden to do so. Instead, I continued working 12-hour days, seven days a week, without a break as I had for most of the year.

I should have followed the advice I gave Mac. The lights in the men’s room seemed wrong. In the mirror my face, hands and arms kept looking gray. For the first time in my life I was weak as a kitten. Fellow employees passing me in the hall kept saying I looked bad. My wife Judy found me at The Fairfax Hospital in Intensive Care. I was covered with wires, hooked to an IV and had a large nitroglycerine pack over my heart. Prolonged extreme stress was causing my vessels to go into spasms and cut the blood supply to my heart. I didn’t have a heart attack. But they told me if I had been a smoker too, they couldn’t have saved me.

After much monitoring and consultation my cardiologist told me, “You can change jobs, or you’ve got six months!”

I said, “Let me think.” Our daughter was 11 and our son was two.

I don’t know when the hiring freeze was lifted. I don’t know how they replaced all the equipment or how all the new employees were trained. My former assistant didn’t know either. My former assistant and I are both civil engineer graduates of The Virginia Military Institute. Both of us completed the two-year Engineer Training Program. Both of us had extensive field experience before we arrived at the Fairfax Residency. The good man who replaced me was a high school graduate with many decades service as a survey party chief. I never knew who replaced my assistant.

I lived what happened to VDOT in two counties. Now I’m watching federal agencies being gutted or shut down by perpetrators who don’t comprehend the agencies’ importance and don’t care about the long-term consequences.

Records are lost. People’s personal information has been breached. Vital long-term experiments are being neglected and destroyed. New diseases are not being identified and nipped in the bud. Crucial key personnel are no longer available, so expertise is lost. Former allies are deeply discouraged as adversaries seize the advantage of our nation’s absence.

Once these abrupt actions are taken, nobody, no matter how powerful, can simply snap their fingers and put things back in place.

Years ago Governor Robb bragged about the millions of dollars he saved. He never mentioned the true cost or the many losses.

Soon others will brag about their signature achievement of saving billions in the United State of America and around the world. They won’t want to enumerate the terrible costs and losses either.

It is almost impossible to prove a negative. But it will be easy to record devastating disease outbreaks, growing violent armed conflicts and other tragic occurrences.

John Chiles

Southern Shores

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