MDOT presents “The Extra Mile” with Paul and Waverly.

Welcome in to another edition of The Extra Mile podcast presented by the Mississippi Department of Transportation. I’m Paul joined by my cohost Waverly. We had plans for this podcast and then of course everyone knows Mother Nature strikes — Hurricane Ida — so today on the podcast we have MDOT PIO Katey Hornsby who is our producer and as well covers the southern district right now for us and that includes hurricanes. Also later in the show we will talk to Shane Martin who is head of the construction division here at MDOT and he’s gonna take us through the construction process.

We’re joined here with MDOT PIO and our lovely producer Katey Hornsby. She is MDOT’s southern district PIO and she’s gonna tell us a little about Hurricane Ida and MDOT's response.

Yeah, so, you know, Hurricane Ida, I’m sure everybody had their eyes glued to the TV as she formed and began making her way through the Gulf and into Louisiana. At the beginning, the way she was tracking and her strength and everything like that, we were predicted to get hit pretty hard not only the Coast where we usually think of impacts of hurricanes but also Southwest Mississippi into Central Mississippi. So going into that our guard was up. We were ready. We were preparing. We were doing everything we can ahead of Hurricane Ida.

We did sustain damage in a lot of different areas throughout our state but it wasn’t as bad as we predicted it to be which is definitely a blessing. There was still some clean up to do in Southwest Mississippi multiple counties, Amite County, Adams, Walthall, you know, just widespread Southwest Mississippi. There was signals that were damaged, traffic signals. There was trees, debris in the roadways. There were some closures different things like that. There had been some congestion that had happened after the storm, a few days after. You know, just people from Louisiana coming in trying to get some gas, different resources, supplies, different things like that. Southwest Mississippi they were hit pretty hard considering the storm. They’ve been working to clean up. They work diligently to do it. We thank those men and women.

Down in south Mississippi, Highway 90, it’s usually the area that tends to get hit pretty hard just mainly because of the storm surge. You have the storm surge that causes flooding, it brings sand and debris and everything like that on the roadways. Just like with the regular severe weather it caused flooding on Highway 90. Our crews were able to hit the ground running as soon as it was safe and begin clearing debris. It’s taken a few days and it’s been an effort but as always they are able to get things rolling and get traffic moving again so we thank them as well. There’s a few other closures, six to four due to flooding as well, a couple things like that as well as central Mississippi. But in the southeast Mississippi there was a washout on State Route 26 that was, I saw it in person and pictures don’t do it justice. It was a really serious washout and that’s something that we’re currently dealing with.

Yeah, so, you said that you were down there and you spoke with the district engineer correct? Can you tell us a little bit about what he said? I did. I spoke with Kelly Castleberry and he, you know, walked us through what exactly happened as well as what’s next. You know, how do we make repairs, how long it might take. He really walked us through it. Instead of me rehashing that we actually filmed him talking about it so we’re gonna actually play that for y ‘all so y ‘all can hear firsthand.

Pretty much right now Highway 26 in George County we have a section of the highway that looks like it’s gone through a slide and what that is the soil looks like it was saturated. We had heavy rains in the area last night. Of course we’ve had heavy rains this year and of course with Ida just coming over us the soil looks like it liquefied and the highway just slipped. We had a major spot and we lost a section of the highway. And where do we kind of go from here? What are the next steps? Right now MDOT’s assessing the situation. We’re in the process of doing a survey using LIDAR. That way we can get a good feel of the roadway condition, the size of the hole, the size of the slide. We’re in the process of getting utilities moved in order for a remediation to begin. So MDOT will take that survey back. We’ll look at the geotechnical aspect of this area and we’ll design a fix for this road. Then we’ll let an emergency contract to make a repair to Highway 26. Again that was Kelly Castleberry kind of recapping what happened and what the next steps are. We will continue to keep y’all updated. It is going to be a process and we will keep y ’all updated along the way.

Thank you for that, Katey. And so what can Mississippi residents and drivers take away from this hurricane? It’s important to remember to treat a hurricane, to take it seriously and treat it like it’s going to be potentially a category four and to prepare, prepare early by getting your evacuation plan in place and to have an emergency kit.

You know, we saw before Ida got close or made landfall there was an increase of people on the roadways doing their last minute errands, choosing to evacuate last minute and that caused a lot of congestion. If you want to avoid that and not be stuck on the roadways and help continue to keep everyone safe then it’s important to plan early and stay off of the roadways as much as possible because our crews are going to be out there trying to prep the roadways and get them ready ahead of the storm. That’s why it’s so important for people to stay home to again keep that congestion down as well as allow enough room on the roadways for our men and women to do the work that they need to do ahead of the storm.

It’s so important not only to try and stay home right before the storm hits while we’re prepping the roads but during the storms as well and right after because as we go out after the storm we’re surveying the roadways, we’re seeing if there’s any damage done, if any roads have been compromised due to flood waters or anything like that so it’s important if possible stay in one place right before, during and after the storm. It will help keep you safe as well as our men and women who are out there trying to keep the roadways safe. Absolutely and it’s always important to be prepared even in the event that nothing happens. It’s always better to be prepared than not. It’s so true and a lot of times people will say should I be prepared? It might not be as bad as you know it’s being predicted. And you know what? If you do prepare and you do evacuate and nothing happens all you did was evacuate and keep yourself safe. You know, you don’t lose anything. It’s a test run. Exactly it’s a test run if nothing else. So you never really lose anything when you stay prepared and you react properly.

And so hurricane season even though we just dealt with this it goes on till the end of November. So can you pitch the MDOT hurricane preparedness resources one more time before we get you out of here? Of course. So we’ve got our normal resources the MDOT Traffic app as well as MDOTtraffic.com and you can use those year round to monitor the roadways and traffic alerts and different stuff like that. We have GoMDOT.com/hurricanes which maps out everything for hurricane season what you need to know, checklist, contraflow information, everything like that. You can find all of that information as well in our evacuation guides. You can actually order those get them sent to your house at GoMDOT.com/Maps. And of course I have to plug our social media because it is such a useful tool that people can use and it’s right on your phone at MSDOT on Facebook and Twitter. Give us a follow and we keep those sites up to date as much as possible so people are aware and they have the latest information to keep them safe. Thank you so much for joining us, Katey. Great information. Thank you, Katey. Thank you for having me.

So Shane Martin is a construction engineer here at MDOT and we’re real excited to have him. So Shane can you tell us a little bit about how you got your start here at MDOT? Sure and thank you for having me. I graduated from Mississippi State like most of us engineers here in December of 1997. I began at MDOT in the Bridge Division in January of ‘98 as an engineer in training. I stayed there for about two years and then left and did a little short stint with a consulting firm. I decided I wanted to come back so I returned to MDOT in July 2000 in the geotechnical branch of Materials Division. Stayed there for 11 years. Came to Construction Division in September of 2011 as the area engineer for district three which is in Yazoo City and district seven in McComb. And then in January of 2017 I was promoted to Assistant State Construction Engineer and then here recently June twenty twenty one I was appointed State Construction Engineer after my predecessor Earl Glenn was promoted to District Engineer in Yazoo City.

Shane, we were talking before the show about the construction process. It’s very complex and learned and it’s very obvious that MDOT doesn’t just decide to do a construction project one day and start. There’s a lot of things that happen. So tell us what warrants a need for an MDOT construction project? Well there’s several different examples. One there could be a major company or manufacturer for example like Nissan, Continental Tire, Toyota that we’ve had here recently. They decide they want to locate their business here and after a location is selected then it’s up to us to provide that infrastructure to support that facility. That’s one example of need. Other examples include adding capacity to a given highway to reduce congestion or alleviate backups that kind of thing. We widened I-55 south from McDowell Road to Byram. Finished that a few years ago. We’re currently working on highway forty nine widening it to six lanes from Richland to Florence so to help alleviate some congestion. Sometimes we have safety projects that we see a need to improve an intersection where something may be considered dangerous or based on crash data or something like that. Also some of our state highways may be a little narrow in spots or curvy in spots and we try to widen or alleviate curves where we can. We have routine district maintenance projects that the districts really prioritize those based on their need, based on how deteriorated the pavement is. And then of course we have an interstate maintenance plan that we have a committee that rides all the interstates in the state every year and develops a three year interstate maintenance plan for that. So those are just some examples of need and how you determine the need for a project.

So when you talk about the interstate maintenance plan and how you drive the interstates once a year and that’s only to improve the interstates correct? Right. Our interstate system is broken up into segments. Sometimes you’ll see a segment of I-55 being overlaid for a given year and that’s something that was determined prior to or determined during a previous interstate ride that this segment of I-55 in Montgomery County is worse than any other section of I-55 in this given area so we prioritize different segments of interstates all over the state to come up with when we need to overlay those.

Okay and so from the time that a project becomes an idea to when cars are actually driving on it what does that timeline usually look like? Once a need is realized really one of the first things we do is we hold what’s called a location committee meeting which is made up of various division personnel and district personnel that’s gonna be involved in the project. Our area engineers and construction division are part of this meeting. We go out and visit a given site. If we’re gonna do a bridge replacement for example on a state highway in a rural area then we’ll go out and look at it. We’re looking for things like utilities. We’re looking for environmental concerns. We’re looking for any kind of local concerns that may pop up in our plan development. So an example of a bridge replacement we usually have three options. We can either close the road and replace the bridge in place if that’s an option but that’s based on whether or not it would cause too much of a disturbance to the local area. We can look at building a detour bridge off to one side and replacing the bridge in place or we can build a new bridge on new alignment while traffic still runs on the old bridge. Those are usually the three alternatives and we try to make the best recommendation based on the field conditions. Once those recommendations are made a report is made and sent in for approval. Once that’s approved then we start moving forward with plan development from there.

This is a team sport. There are a lot of different people at MDOT that are involved. When does preconstruction kind of start to come into play there? Preconstruction comes in right at well I guess the location committee meeting is you can consider a preconstruction activity as well. We have Environmental Division involved. We have Roadway. We have Bridge in this example. The district construction division involved. Right of Way division. That’s something else we would determine whether or not we need to buy Right of Way. Once all that’s figured out we start developing field review plans which is basically a preliminary set of plans that gives us an idea of putting to paper what we’re thinking about when we’re out in the field looking at this job to begin with. Once we determine that the field review plans look good in the example I was talking about with a bridge replacement, you know, when we go out to do a field review a lot of times the bridge will be staked off. So we have an idea. We want to make sure what we’ve drawn up initially will work out there, that we’re not missing something and there’s no conflicts we need to deal with like a driveway or something that needs to be relocated. Once that’s complete then we move to an office review stage which really starts picking up the pace on things. The office review plans are a lot more detailed. They’ll have a lot of features in them. They’ll have all your pay item quantities and descriptions you know like how much asphalt are we gonna need, how much concrete do we need for this, how long is the bridge gonna be and all that kind of stuff. It will show all the local features on the roadway sheet like if there are wetlands it will show that. It will show the terrain of the road, houses, driveways, local businesses, property, right of way area and all that kind of stuff.

So there’s lots of little pieces involved. There’s lots of little pieces involved. Office reviews once those plans are complete then we have an office review where all the players involved roadway, bridge, construction, anybody else district and project office personnel, project engineer that’s gonna be overseeing this is involved. So we all sit down and go through the plans to see if there’s any corrections that need to be made. Depending on the scope and complexity of the project sometimes this can take a couple hours. Sometimes it can take a couple days. We’ve had some that have gone a week. I was involved in one one day that I think we started about ten o’clock that morning in Roadway Design and I don’t remember the exact time that the lights in the building cut out automatically but we were there that late and we could not figure out where the little button was to make them come back on cause they’re on a timer so we finished that office review with our phones using the flashlight. I think we walked out of there about nine o’clock that night. That’s dedication right there. Yeah.

That really shows how much dedication and how much goes into construction projects. Once the plans are hammered out so when do they actually like go to bid? Is that the next step in the process? Almost. Actually once the final plans are developed then they are sent to construction division and then we take those plans and we develop the contract bid proposal. The proposal contains notice to bidders and special provisions and other information that may not be captured in our standard specifications or in the plans or things like that. Such as if we’re gonna require night work on the job. That’s gonna be a notice to bidders that you’ll see in the proposal. There may be a note in the plans but that’s something you want to call the bidders attention to.

So we develop our proposal and then we also then in turn develop the state estimate. Once those things are done and we finalize our proposals then we work with contract administration to get the advertisement ready to go out. Then once projects are advertised they’re posted on our GoMDOT page under business center project letting. We allow contractors to submit questions that we’re responsible for answering. If there are any mistakes in our plans or contract documents that we catch or sometimes they get called to our attention we can correct those also by an addendum that’s also posted online. Bids are received the fourth Tuesday of every month. We take those bids and we compare them to our state estimate. Contract administration goes through and makes sure they are no irregularities. Then there’s a group of staff that makes recommendations to the commission as to whether or not a project should be rewarded or rejected based on those bids.

Once the projects are rewarded then they go to construction and they’re turned over to the district and the project engineer that’s gonna oversee the construction. And by that point construction division becomes more of a support role. Our area engineers help resolve conflicts or issues that may come up out in the field during construction. Try to assist the project engineers on what’s the best way to handle a given situation. They also make routine site visits just to check and see how things are going. Get out there and talk with the project engineers and make sure everything’s going okay and stuff like that.

Once a project is complete then the project engineer calls for a final inspection and again that’s something our area engineers and construction division are involved in. They’ll go out with the project engineer, the district personnel, sometimes the contractor is there too and go through and inspect everything and make sure everything looks okay. If there’s some minor items that need to be corrected they notify the contractor of that. Once it’s done the project engineer informs us that everything looks good and we’re ready to release it. So what we do is we write what’s called a maintenance release which is issued to the contractor that lets him know you’re done, we’re good with the work you’ve done and at that point going forward MDOT takes over maintenance of the facility we just constructed.

So y ’all are involved from beginning to end of all these projects? Yes. You specifically, you’ve been at MDOT for a while in the construction division for a while. What’s one of the projects that you’ve worked on that you’re really proud of? I’ve been involved in a lot of stuff that I’m proud of. Gosh even before I was in the construction division when I was in the geotechnical branch I was heavily involved in the Greenville River Bridge. I spent a lot of time up there when that was constructed. In the Construction Division I was involved partially in the I-55 south widening to Byram. The office review I was talking about we had to use our phones as flashlights was a big pavement restoration project in district seven in McComb that turned out really nice. So yeah there have been several projects I’ve been involved in and I’ve enjoyed in my career here.

Well thanks so much for telling us all of this. This is a lot of information that we’ve learned about how the process goes from beginning to end. I think it shows a lot of the work that MDOT does so thank you so much for joining us. Well thank you for having me. I hope I’ve been informative and helpful. I would do this again sometime if I need to. Well we would love to have you back. Thank you so much, Shane. Thank you.

It’s been a very informative episode. Before we get out here, we would like to say that all of our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by Ida. On a little bit of a lighter note, we have college football season beginning. Wavelry, are you excited? I’m so excited and I’m also excited about MDOT’s Road to Game Day campaign. Safety is one of MDOT’s top priorities and this campaign focuses on making sure drivers make it to all their games safely and roadside workers remain safe while working on the highways. There is going to be influx of traffic with college football and football in general traveling all over the southeast to these games and we want drivers to be patient and safe out there on the roads. And we’ve got a terrific resource to get you to the game on time and safely. The MDOT Traffic app. You can also visit MDOTtraffic.com before you head out. And also… be sure to definitely follow us on social media @MississippiDOT on Facebook and Twitter and good luck to your teams. Absolutely, good luck to your teams. Before we get out of here, let’s thank Katey Hornsby, our wonderful producer and our editor Drew Hall. Thank you for all the hard work that you do. And remember to drive smart out there on Mississippi highways.