FRED. CO.
Set to open by year’s end
Olney 370 97 355 28 Rockville 270 Norbeck 28 586
Intercounty Connector route
0 MILES 495 3 Bethesda 185 495 B 650 Colesville
MONT. CO.
Wheaton 97 MA R Y L A N D Burtonsville 95
Fairland 29
E
212 1
95 495
P.G. CO.
Beltsville 198 D 1
LOUD. CO.
MD. 108 Norwood
FAIRFAX CO.
VA. CO.
29 D.C.
she says. “But, in the end, we’re providing a facility that’s very much needed, and our goal is to do it in a way that protects the environment and property as much as possible.” Peters lives northwest of Baltimore but says that having
grown up in Prince George’s and having family in Mont- gomery gives her an appreciation for how much the ICC has already altered the local landscape. During an October visit to the construction site, Peters tours Longmead Crossing, a large subdivision in Silver Spring that the highway will bisect. She points to an enormous ribbon of reddish brown mud seen from hundreds of kitchen windows and back yards. “That was 300 yards of woods,” Peters says.
“Now, it’s gone.”
Peters’s job is to keep construction on schedule and on budget by ensuring that everyone — the federal, state and county environmental agencies, community groups, politicians, consultants and national contracting firms doing the design and construction — stays informed and involved. She must make sure the problem of the day gets solved, whether it’s rescuing steel girders from a broken- down truck or fixing the holes that groundhogs chew through the mesh construction fence. She does it with a mix of enthusiasm — she greets
Left: Peters meets with her project management team in Beltsville in June. Right: Peters and community outreach liaison Tim Cooke go over a map of the road.
good news with a fist-in-the-air “Woo-hoo!” — and resolve, cutting off lengthy discussions among her management team with, “What’s the bottom line here?” She talks, walks and thinks quickly, her per- sonal pace matching that of a project that will be designed and built in four years — half the typical
grandkids; they had a playground and a pool and a beautiful tree in their front yard. We worked with her for months and told her if she really want- ed to stay in their home, we’d work on a solution, but we had to [tell] her that
she’d have a highway five feet from her garage and live in the middle of a construction zone for three years.” Myrlene Matala says she and her husband decided to sell
their house, which has since been demolished, to the state and move to Howard County. Almost three years later, her voice chokes with emotion when she tells of having to leave the home where they had raised three children and planned to remain through their golden years. Peters “tried to be as gentle and kind as she could be,”
Matala, 67, says, “but it was just a bad situation.” Where their home once stood, “it’s just dirt now.” Peters didn’t get involved in the debate over whether the
ICC should be built. It is simply her job to help get it done, she says. But driving between the project offices in Beltsville and Rockville, she says, she sees firsthand that motorists need a more reliable alternative to the Capital Beltway and jammed local roads. The state included $370 million worth of environmental projects in the ICC’s budget to offset some of the ecological damage. “Yes, we are taking homes, and, yes, we are taking trees,”
time for a road this size. Off the job, she doesn’t let up. She spends much of her
free time training for an Ironman triathlon later this month in New York. “She’s a super go-getter, so energetic. You get tired watch-
ing her sometimes,” says Ken Briggs, Peters’s former boss at the Maryland State Highway Administration, who became her deputy on the ICC. Peters starts most days at 4:30 a.m. with an hour or two of
triathlon training. She arrives at her Beltsville office as early as 7 a.m. With an early start, she says, she usually can leave by 4:30 p.m., BlackBerry in hand, to get her older son to a la- crosse match or soccer practice. Colleagues say they routinely receive e-mails from her at
midnight and again at 5 a.m. the next day. “You can get a lot of things done between nine and 12 o’clock at night,” Peters explains, laughing. “I don’t know how she does it, and I live with her,” says her
husband, Phil J. Peters, 43. “I don’t know how she physically does what she does — just the [ICC] project alone, then two kids, a mother-in-law, a husband, a puppy, a cat, sports, having friends over. It’s so overwhelming, but it’s a controlled chaos we live in.”
John Heagy says his sister, the middle of three children, wasn’t the little girl who liked to play with dump trucks. She spent much of her early years swimming competitively,
july 18, 2010 | The WashingTon PosT Magazine 21
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