WYPR: This Week on Chesapeake Summer...Bay Bridge Workers Get Ready for Holiday Traffic (2008-07-04)

If the Chesapeake Bay is the heart of many Maryland summers, then the Chesapeake Bay Bridge is the artery that frequently is clogged with traffic. In this Fourth of July edition of our Chesapeake Summer series, WYPR's Joel McCord visits with some of the people who try to keep that artery open.

At some point this weekend, Catherine Lewis will look west from her toll booth at the bridge and see a mass of cars, vans, trucks and motorcycles clogging every lane of U.S. Route 50 and heading her way.

But will she panic? No way.

The traffic's going to be there and you're doing everything you can as quickly as you can to pull your traffic through. That's all you can do. You can't get upset and frazzled or else, you know, you're going to be a nervous wreck, you know?

That's why she has a system.

And if you don't have a system, your money's going to be thrown all over the place. So what I do is I take the money, I throw it down and I give the change back that I need to give and before I take the next car, that money's straightened out and put in the right slot before that next transaction happens.

Once you get good at it, you can get as many as 350 cars an hour through your toll lane.

Lewis is one of 34 toll takers who work the 11 booths at the entrance to the eastbound span of the bridge, around the clock. And although she's confident now, it wasn't that way two years ago when she started on a weekend in late June.

I worked the day and I went home and told my husband, What have I gotten myself into?' I mean, it was absolutely crazy. It's a job to where you have to multi-task, you have to be quick and you have to be precise.

That means hit the button on the touch screen in front of you that records the type of vehicle, take the money, make the correct change, keep the money straight the right denominations in the right slots and be ready for the next car; over and over and over again.

Officials at the Maryland Transportation Authority, which operates the bridge, are predicting some 317,000 vehicles will cross the bay during the three-day weekend.

Inevitably, some of those vehicles will get stuck up there. That's where the vehicle recovery team comes in.

Skip Morgan supervises the team, which patrols the bridge every half hour or so, on the look-out for debris, disabled vehicles and accidents.

If it's a major accident, fire department will respond, take care of their part and the police will do their investigation, and then we'll go ahead and clear the scene, open the roadway back up.

Most of those accidents result from drivers not paying attention, he says; like the one on a Wednesday afternoon two weeks ago. He rear-ended a stopped car in front of him, leading to a four car pile-up on the eastbound span and a back-up all the way to I-97.

We needed accident reconstruction out there and that took time before, you know, we could touch the vehicles. And of course, rush hour hits at five, so it was a pretty busy day.

Traffic didn't clear up until eight or nine that night.

This weekend, they'll double up shifts, he said.

At the same time, Corporal Robert Thibodeau will be among the Transportation Authority Police patrolling the bridge. He works from the toll plaza to the first exit on Kent Island, doubles back to the first exit on the Western Shore and does it again. He concedes it can get pretty boring at times, but he also gets intimately familiar with the road.

I mean there could be a piece of tire tread on the roadway, and you'll pick it up immediately. I mean like there's something green laying right out there in that lane of traffic.

He says this crossing the westbound span at mid-day on Monday when what traffic there is flows smoothly in both directions.

You should come back about five o'clock Thursday afternoon; you'll see or nine o'clock on Sunday night, after the holiday, coming this way.

I'll pass, thank you.

I'm Joel McCord, reporting at the Bay Bridge for 88.1, WYPR.