click to enlarge - Luke Awtry
- Breannah Grant
The sun would soon set on a recent May day in Burlington when the flagging crew from Four Seasons Traffic Control arrived for work. At the intersection with Main Street, contractors had cordoned off one side of South Winooski Avenue to prepare for paving over winter's pockmarks, and the flaggers waved drivers through the construction zone.
Gage Capen, who has flagged for Four Seasons since last summer, nearly got clipped by a car passing too close.
"This lady came flying down in a Prius," Capen said a few hours later, recounting the drive-by mere inches from his kneecap. "I'm standing down there at the main intersection with my 'stop' sign." The driver then threw up her hands at Capen, he said, expressing her frustration from behind the wheel.
Hostile drivers are a routine job hazard for flagging crews, which are a perennial feature of Vermont's summer roadwork season. Pent-up demand for paving projects in a short period of time leads, inevitably, to frequent and sometimes unexpected traffic tie-ups.
Drivers may get annoyed about waiting for a flagger to turn their "stop" sign to "slow." But, as Capen pointed out, a vehicle going the wrong way at the wrong time through a construction site can lead to a serious accident.
"We're here to keep them safe and all these guys safe," Capen said, gripping the glowing, red lightsaber-like wand that he uses to wave drivers past the construction workers. "When we catch an attitude, it's like, 'Listen, we have to stand out here all night and direct traffic, be on our feet all night.' And most of us try to be as respectful and as kind as possible."
Heidi and Jeff LaRouche founded Four Seasons Traffic Control in February 2020. Based at the LaRouches' home in Poultney, it's a relative newcomer in a field of more entrenched companies such as Green Mountain Flagging and ADA Traffic Control, which calls itself the largest traffic control provider in New England.
But the newcomer hasn't lacked for business, according to its owners. Four Seasons billed $2.1 million in 2021 and more than doubled that last year, Jeff said. He expects to top $10 million in sales this year.
With a woman at the helm of Four Seasons, the owners are making an effort to bring more female flaggers into the male-dominated field. "We're trying to undo that [bias] by hiring as many women as we can, to prove a point that women belong in this industry, too," Jeff said. In addition, many state and federal contract jobs — such as those on state routes or U.S. interstate highways — require a percentage of female and minority hires.
Four Seasons currently has 87 flaggers on its payroll, but employee numbers fluctuate depending on the volume of contracted work. When Vermont work slows in the winter, Four Seasons has pursued jobs in Connecticut, where utility construction, including a burst of broadband build-out since the pandemic, has created high year-round demand for flaggers.
"That's where the money is," Jeff said. He earns an average of $35 an hour per flagger in Vermont and about $15 per hour more than that out of state. When he makes more, so do his workers, he added. Four Seasons also does jobs in New York. Other Vermont flagging companies work in those states, too, as well as New Hampshire and Maine.
Most flaggers show up for the money. At Four Seasons, they start at $19 an hour; experienced workers can make as much as $23.
Two to four flaggers work each "package," the construction terms for a closed section of road. Some big gigs involve multiple packages and as many as two dozen flagging crew members at a time.
For the South Winooski Avenue paving, the four-person Four Seasons crew tended to three blocks between Main and Adams streets amid the whir of generators, the rumble of dump trucks, the grind of asphalt milling machines and the backing-up beeps of heavy equipment. The flaggers alerted one another to traffic movements over walkie-talkies clipped to their neon-yellow vests.
Once darkness descended, a few neighbors complained about the blinding light towers that illuminated the worksite and asked the flaggers to turn them off, Capen said. He wore a vest with reflective trim over an insulated jacket and matching gaiters.
State rules mandate both the gear and the giant light fixtures. "Without those at nighttime, even with this stuff on, they don't see us until the last second," Capen said. Like many Vermont flaggers, the 23-year-old has moved among the major companies, working for both Green Mountain and ADA before Four Seasons.
Jeff, 44, was flagging for ADA when he had the idea to start his own company.
"I love interacting with people," Jeff said in a gravelly voice from Hawaii, where he and Heidi were on vacation earlier this month.
For Jeff, the business is a testament to how far he has come since his youth. He grew up with an adoptive family and started getting into trouble in high school, he said. At 19, he went to prison after a drunken night of smashing car windows and mailboxes.
His first wife struggled with addiction, and Jeff began selling marijuana and prescription drugs as well as using them, he said. Later, he got into heroin and spent time in and out of prison.
In 2016, after another arrest, Jeff decided to turn things around. Through a federal drug program that offered an alternative to incarceration, he was released in two years and went into recovery while working multiple jobs and joining support groups. He divorced his wife.
In 2019, he and Heidi met through a Facebook post. He wrote, "I'm only looking for people who are real," Heidi recalled. They married in October 2021.
Heidi, 34, was raised in Pawlet by farmers who taught her to work hard and not judge others, she said. After working as a machine operator in New Hampshire and Vermont factories, she was doing electrochemical machining for jet blades at GE Aviation in Rutland when she met Jeff.
click to enlarge - Courtesy
- Heidi and Jeff LaRouche
To get Four Seasons off the ground and on the road, the LaRouches sought financial support and guidance from several small-business programs. BROC Community Action, which operates in Rutland and Bennington counties, provided business planning and consulting services. The Vermont APEX Accelerator program, formerly known as VT PTAC, helped with documentation and regulation.
"I didn't have a business degree or anything," Heidi said. "I just kind of learned as I went along."
Traffic control depends on safety, and maintaining safety, the LaRouches said, means constant communication with those on the job about potential risks.
One big risk for flaggers is heat exhaustion. Flaggers stand for as long as 12 hours in sweltering temperatures, and freshly poured, steaming pavement exacerbates the effects of 90-plus-degree days. Four Seasons requires that its workers follow strict rules for self-care.
"If you come to work with Ring Dings and Red Bull and you get heat exhaustion ... you're violating our policies," Jeff said. "Our policies are you must bring water and Gatorade, nutritious food, fruit, vegetables, sandwiches, trail mix — stuff like that."
On one of Four Seasons' first jobs, in Wells River, four flaggers "fell out" with heat exhaustion in a single day. Jeff, who was running that job, put them in his air-conditioned car and revived them with Gatorade, bananas and trail mix.
Besides actively working to hire more women as flaggers, the LaRouches like to give opportunities to members of other underemployed populations, including people without high school degrees. "We hire people fresh into recovery, fresh out of jail," Heidi said.
Jeff continued, "People who have autism, PTSD, military vets, older folks that have retired, young kids that have never had a job and they don't know what being a productive member of society is. We try to teach these people."
Capen came to Four Seasons with a flawed record. He currently faces charges of grossly negligent vehicle operation in Rutland stemming from an accident in July 2020, when the car he was driving flipped, killing one of three passengers. Capen has pleaded not guilty. He said he shared the information when he began working for Four Seasons.
"A lot of employers look at that and don't really want anything to do with me," Capen said, adding that his supervisors at Four Seasons never flinched. "They were pretty accepting. They didn't really bother me or look at me any differently."
Just this week, they promoted him to lead a crew on North Winooski Avenue, he said. Flagger Emily Biscoe, 19, joined Four Seasons this month for the pay and schedule, which she said pairs well with her part-time work for a shop near her Rutland home. She worried a bit about entering a workplace with so many men, she said.
"Sometimes, in that environment, they get very masculine and testosterone-y," she said. But at Four Seasons, "I don't think I've actually ever been treated more equally, like everybody's on the same page."
For women flaggers, though, some things are more difficult — specifically, bathroom breaks. Around midnight on the South Winooski Avenue jobsite, Biscoe had to go. The construction company had provided no portable toilet. Flaggers must stay at their posts throughout their shift unless an extra member can cover for them, so Capen gave her a break.
Biscoe tried to get a ride with a construction worker to Cumberland Farms, which is open 24-7, but she finally gave up and relieved herself somewhere nearby. From unfriendly drivers to outside peeing, it's all in a day's work for a professional flagger.