Watching the above video of a TxDot sweeping operation brought back memories of my days as a TxDoT employee and working with a mobile pavement marking crew.
One of my greatest memories of this job is how slow we moved and how fast the public seemed to be driving.
While painting the road, our mobile operations top speed was normally ten miles per hour and sometimes slower. Combine that with highway traffic passing between 55 and 70 miles per hour and you have a recipe for disaster.
When performing these mobile operations we always had a mobile work zone present behind the paint truck. This normally consisted of two large trucks (aka crash trucks) that had crash attenuators attached to their rear ends. In the event of a rear end collision, these attenuator would absorb the impact. (The above pictures shows a crash truck with the crash attenuator attached)
During those two years, there were many close calls, but thankfully I was never involved in an accident where the crash attenuators had to be utilized.
The video below shows a crash attenuator being hit.
You can see by the videos and picture above that this work is done very close to and on the roadway. A moment never went by where in the back of my mind, I thought of how I could be hit by a car.
