Safety first: Caltrans increases roadwork protections for workers

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The whooshing breeze of freeway traffic “whizzing by” is occasionally powerful enough to fling Caltrans workers’ hard hats from their heads, District 5 Maintenance Manager Micah Gammons said.

Once while crack-sealing a stretch of U.S. 101 near King City, Gammons said that a car skidded into the construction enclosure he was working in, but no one was hurt.

“That’s the closest I ever got [to being hit],” he said. “It was pretty scary.”

Gammons was among dozens of Caltrans employees who attended District 5’s annual worker memorial ceremony at the district’s San Luis Obispo headquarters near the end of April. The Caltrans division Gammons works for covers San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties. The 2025 event’s keynote speaker was Marjie Kirn, Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG) executive director.

“I’m here today not just as a regional transportation partner, but as someone whose life was forever touched by a moment just like the ones we are remembering today,” Kirn said at the April 30 vigil. “Over 30 years ago, I was nine months pregnant, just about to welcome my first child into the world. I just started my maternity leave and was waiting for my husband to come home. He was a Caltrans maintenance worker at the time.”

The day before her baby’s due date, Kirn received “a call that nobody wants to receive,” she said. Her husband was hit by a car while operating a loader on a center divide of Highway 152.

“The driver that struck him that day died,” Kirn said. “Eventually my husband did come home, injured but alive. … He was in therapy for months. Rehab. But he was alive.

“Not every family gets that outcome,” she continued. “Let’s remind our Central Coast residents and drivers: When you see the orange cones, the flashing lights, those are workers in those medians and on the side of the road. Slow down. Move over. Give them the space they need to do their job and stay alert, because behind every hard hat is a person with a family.”

District 5’s aim to keep work zones as safe as possible for workers and the public aligns with Caltrans’ statewide goal of lowering employee fatalities and serious injuries to zero per year by 2050. Across District 5, there have been 28 work-related injuries this year as of July 22, Safety Coordinator Susana Cruz told the Sun via email. In 2024, there were 12.

The last District 5 employee who died while on duty, after an errant driver crashed into his work truck, was Michael Feliciano in 2004. Feliciano’s name is engraved on a stone monument outside of the district’s base in San Luis Obispo along with the seven other fallen workers it commemorates.

Between Feliciano’s death in 2004 and 1980, two District 5 workers—Thomas M. Sanders and Manuel S. Leon—lost their lives on the job. Like Feliciano, both were struck by errant drivers.

“We really need the public to slow down and pay attention to the people that are out there. These are real people that we need to help go home to their families,” District 5 Director Scott Eades told the Sun. “It’s easy to feel frustrated when you come up in the back of a queue and you’re wondering what’s going on and you’re trying to get through your day. But that sense of frustration isn’t helping our folks that need to maintain the roadway.”

New norms

One of Eades’ biggest takeaways about the district’s work on Santa Barbara County’s ongoing U.S. 101 multimodal corridor project is that construction efforts were notably smooth in 2020—from a safety and productivity standpoint—thanks to a niche circumstance: lower traffic volume at the start of the pandemic.

While countless employers across the U.S. and abroad pivoted to meet COVID-19 mandates during and following the spring of 2020, Caltrans’ plans for the Santa Barbara County project weren’t heavily altered that year, he said.

“Construction started, actually, right when COVID hit,” Eades told the Sun. “We were actually just about to get the project out to construction when the whole world shut down. … We were able to have the contractors’ personnel and our personnel working outside. So we just kept working.”

“We were able to get a lot done through the COVID years,” he continued. “It was a great time because there were fewer people on the road.”

Project reconstruction efforts run through Santa Barbara, Montecito, Carpinteria, and Summerland. Eades was referring to the Summerland construction segment of the corridor project, which began in 2020 and wrapped up earlier this year in April. This part of the project established 7 miles of new carpool lanes on Highway 101 and other revisions to alleviate traffic congestion for daily commuters between Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

SBCAG and Caltrans secured $134 million in state funds to support the final phase of the project on July 21, effectively stamping an estimated 2028 finish line on the project.

Aside from tackling bottleneck traffic issues, the ongoing corridor project presented Caltrans, SBCAG, and other agencies with the opportunity to reduce the probability of District 5 workers being injured in the future, thanks to infrastructure improvements that’ll require less frequent maintenance than in the past, Assemblymember Gregg Hart (D-Santa Barbara) explained.

Some old parts of the 101 tied to the project require regular maintenance and repaving about once a decade “because the potholes really get out of control.” The new lanes are made of continuously reinforced concrete pavement rather than asphalt, Hart said.

“It doesn’t have that wear, and it’s never going to need to be repaved, like the asphalt structures do,” he told the Sun. “This is going to eliminate having to go and close the freeway to repave it every 10 years.”

“Those future maintenance expenses oftentimes can be more expensive than the original project with inflation,” he continued. “So by eliminating those additional maintenance events, we’re going to save taxpayer money too.”

As work continues, Hart said that the project feels closer to completion than ever thanks to the $134 million grant secured through Senate Bill 1 funding programs.

Without it, Hart said the estimated 2028 finish date would have been more than a decade off.

“I don’t know that we’d ever honestly get there,” he said. “You can imagine how long it would take—$10- and $20-million increments over many, many, many years.”

One big component of the multi-year corridor project some “folks don’t naturally recognize” from the get-go is the number of creek crossings it encompasses, Hart added.

“All of the creek crossings in those 16 miles have been expanded to allow more flow from storm events to go under the freeway without backing up and causing flood slides and debris flows,” he said. “So it’s a safety improvement from a flooding standpoint as well.”

Hart said that this segment of the project originated with the 2018 Montecito mudslides and debris flow that resulted in 23 deaths and made the highway impassable.

“This is intentionally designed to provide more flow, so we don’t have those kinds of events in the future,” he said.

Uphill and downhill battles

On another side of District 5, in Big Sur, Caltrans workers continue dealing with the aftermath of landslides that have kept a 7-mile stretch of Highway 1 closed since February 2024.

Through-travel across the Big Sur coast has been impossible one way or the other for Highway 1 drivers since January 2023 due to a slew of winter storms and the landslides that followed them.

In August 2024, the region’s latest landslide enveloped a Caltrans work site at Regent’s Slide, where District 5 crews have led repair efforts since a February 2024 slide. 

“In the 75-mile stretch of the Big Sur coast from San Carpoforo Creek Beach up to Carmel River, there are 1,500 mapped landslide areas,” District 5 Public Information Officer Kevin Drabinski told the Sun. “The priority in the repair of this slide is to do it in a way which provides for worker safety. And to that end, it’s one of the most measured and monitored mountains anywhere in California right now.”

Drones make up part of “the vast array of surface monitoring equipment” District 5 currently uses to map Regent’s Slide on a daily basis, Drabinski explained.

“We’re able to assess every day whether or not it’s safe to be out there,” he said. “What we have to be alert for is the possibility that there could be spontaneous, catastrophic slides that could take place. That’s always an ever-present concern. That’s the reason we have the monitoring equipment.”

The height, steepness, and overall instability of Regent’s Slide led District 5 to work with Caterpillar Inc. after the August 2024 slide to outfit two bulldozers and one excavator with remote control capabilities.

“[This] is the first time that Caltrans has done this on such a large scale,” Drabinski said.

Since mid-April, the new remote-controlled equipment has allowed District 5 maintenance crews to perform tasks at Regent’s Slide that would raise major safety concerns if the dozer or excavator in question were manned.

While traditional dozers with drivers in the cab continue pushing material “up to the hedge” of Regent’s Slide, “we have the remote-controlled equipment drive that material onto what we know is an active slide and continue with the excavation down the mountain,” Drabinski explained.

Sometime in mid-September, Drabinski said, Caltrans will have a better picture of when the 7-mile stretch of Highway 1 below Regent’s Slide should be able to reopen.

As District 5 crews gradually bring the slide slope down, “we will be going back and installing shear dowels in the slope behind us,” he explained. As of July 23, nearly 2,000 of the roughly 60-foot steel bars have been installed.

“That gives us two benefits. It enhances the safety of the crews that are working on the slope,” Drabinski said, “and then when the highway does reopen, the slope above the highway will have greater stability. That will protect the traveling public.”

Class in session

Like absorbing a new language, it’s best to get a handle on California’s Move Over Law at a young age, District 5 Public Information Officer Heidi Crawford told the Sun.

California’s Move Over Law applies to both emergency and maintenance vehicles. When switching lanes isn’t an option, the law requires vehicles to slow down before becoming parallel with anything on the side of the road that’s flashing red-, blue-, or amber-colored lights. 

Outside of donning her bright orange Safety Sam—Caltrans’ official mascot—costume at District 5-led community events geared toward children, Crawford periodically visits Arroyo Grande High School to educate older students “about what Caltrans does, everything from environmental to infrastructure, to safety being our top priority.”

The benefit of engaging with teenagers specifically is that “they’re just now learning how to drive,” said Crawford, who tries to encourage the students she meets to “get in the habit of slowing down when you see those amber lights and pay attention.”

Crawford hopes that these programs instill a sense of patience in young drivers ahead of their first or early encounters cruising past roadside work zones on the freeway.

“In California, … I feel like our mentality is, ‘Hurry up, we have so much to do. Places to be. Places to go,’” the Shell Beach resident said. “Sometimes, I’ve even seen people holler [at Caltrans crews]. It’s obnoxious. … I’m not sure exactly what that is and what’s sped people up so much without realizing they’re human beings that are working their job.

“If you think about them as … a person that you care about deeply, you’d be very careful driving around them. You would move over. You would slow down. You would be patient,” she continued. “That’s what I try to emphasize.”

Reach Senior Staff Writer Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.

This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 10, 2025.