{the rough road}
keep work moving. Lane closure restrictions during rush hours — and, worse yet, more rain — would cause even further delays. ¶ Suddenly, Peters has an idea: Avoid prolonged pain. Rip the Band-Aid off quickly. ¶ “What would it take to do a full closure?” she asks. “How long would it take to get [the paving] done overnight with a detour?” ¶ The other 15 people at the long confer- ence table — all of them men — stare back. A long, silent moment passes before someone speaks up, “Oh, man, talk about thinking outside the box.” ¶ “I’m talking about the middle of the night with a lot of notification,” Peters says. “Would people like to be inconvenienced overnight for one night or for six weeks?… I think we’re all tired of staring at a bridge we can’t get traffic on.” ¶ “Okay,” says the consultant, Dennis McMahon. “We’ll look at that way-outside-the-box stuff.”
Much about Peters, in fact, is atypical. The job of project director in highway construction — a ca- reer-defining role — typically goes to men in their 50s and 60s with 30-plus years of experience. Pe- ters is 37. When she took on the job at the Maryland State Highway Administration in 2006, she was 11 years out of Virginia Tech’s engineering school and had two young children. She is one of the youngest women in the United States to manage the design and construction of a “major project,” a term re- served for those that are particularly large and complex, with budgets topping $500 million, ac- cording to the Federal Highway Administration. Plans for the ICC roiled Maryland politics for 50
years, spawning two federal lawsuits and sparking decades of protest before turning an enormous swath of the Maryland suburbs into a dirt pit. Business leaders and supporters deemed the six-lane highway critical to speeding travel between the state’s Inter- state 270 and Interstate 95 business corridors, and reducing congestion on east-west roads outside the Capital Beltway. Environmental groups argued that it would promote more sprawl (and, in turn, more traffic and air pollution) while de- stroying the wetlands, woods and streams in its path. The debate effectively ended in late 2007, when a federal
judge rejected the environmental groups’ lawsuits, clearing the way for construction of the $2.56 billion highway — the most expensive Maryland has ever built. Mike Baker, the ICC’s environmental construction manager,
who also worked on the $2.5 billion Woodrow Wilson Bridge re- construction, is blunt about the pressure that Peters — and her 25-person management team — are under. “It’ll either make or break you,” Baker says of leading a
project this large and complex. “You’ll either be the hero, or it will ruin your career.”
Peters and her team must thread the ICC through long- established neighborhoods between Gaithersburg and Lau- rel. The highway will run just beyond the back decks of many homes whose residents say they never knew their bucolic view
belonged to a highway right-of-way. In some neighborhoods, the construction is so close that if the homeowners were to watch Monday night football on a large-screen TV with the shades up, someone atop a bulldozer could follow the game. The state used eminent domain law to buy 40 homes,
three businesses and parts of 278 private and publicly owned parcels to clear the road’s path. During three years of plan- ning, Peters and other highway officials visited communities along the 18.8-mile alignment. Emotions ran so high that some residents shouted “Liars!” and less printable insults at Peters and the others. In one case, Peters says, she notified police after a homeowner, who’d been told his yard would be surveyed in preparation for the state’s purchase, wrote her to say he had a knife. Having to explain to people why they would lose their
homes was one of the hardest parts of her job, Peters says. She recalls sitting in the kitchen of Myrlene and John Matala’s Derwood home after the highway’s final route had been cho- sen and watching the distraught woman break into tears. “It was horrible,” Peters remembers. “They’d been in their home 30 years, and both were retired and were watching their
“I don’t come into meetings and think, ‘I’m the only woman at this table.’ I don’t see the world that way.”
20 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | July 18, 2010
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