I’m working on an article for a specialty magazine. It’s about the construction of a new highway here in Ohio. Or, more precisely, the re-construction of an existing highway by widening and straightening it and adding limited access on-ramps and exits. I’ve read through at least a ream of feasibility studies and studies for improvements (that started 40 years ago) and environmental impact studies and summaries of reasonable alternatives and study area and logical termini, until I was nearly blind. Most of this has been done with my atlas opened at my feet so I could follow the path of the words, hoping they would make more sense on the map.
Yesterday, I was able to actually make phone contact with the Project Administrators in both districts who are involved with the daily hands-on planning of this industrious project. Their main goal is to improve safety for the overload of semi trucks and their drivers who use this road for ingress and egress to carry goods into and out of major metro areas.
It seems this stretch of road is responsible for most of the traffic fatalities in the state. There are over 300 personal residence driveways and business driveways that lead directly onto the highway where the bulk of the state’s semi-trucks travel. Rail traffic is not a feasible alternative.
And then there are the bald eagle nests and the endangered bats and orchids to contend with. And other wetlands. And the farmers whose lands are being chopped apart as the road is straightened.
The article was just another assignment until I talked to the Project Administrators. It was when they described how they held meetings with the farmers and introduced the farmers to the persons who would be working with them on the right-of-way issues, the tone in their voices when they described working together with the environmentalists, when they described the homeowners who are losing part of their yards and driveways, but gaining the ability to be able to back out of that driveway without being run over.
No matter how much research I do for an article, it’s always during the interviewing that the real story gets told.
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