Visit the Eastside Baltimore area around East Chase street where buildings are being raised and debris hauled away and you may be surprised by the number of women wearing hard hats, overseeing the construction site and directing operations for portions of the $800 million project.
“I facilitate and manage the entire $8 million demolition contract,” said Robin Carter-Morton, director of operations for East Baltimore Development Inc.
Her task is to make sure that the contractor and subcontractors adhere to all conditions of the demolition project, which involves raising about 400 homes in the Eastside community near Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
The demolition is the first phase of plan to build a combination of retail, office and housing in the community that will one day become home to a bio-tech park to serve the Hopkins medical institutions, according to East Baltimore Development, Inc.
A nonprofit, East Baltimore Development was created in 2002 as a public/private partnership to lead work on the project, which is expected to take 10 years to complete, according to company brochures.
Carter-Morton is the go-to person overseeing much of the contract work, and she also serves from time to time as the on-site liaison between East Baltimore Development and the local community surrounding the project.
Sometimes, Carter-Morton said she has to mount a 45-foot-high boom to help hose down the dust rising from the debris being demolished.
Other times, she is making sure trucks hauling debris are properly sealed so that debris doesn?t fly out of the bed.
Often she is in touch with Dierdre Ford, project manager for P&J Contracting Co. in Baltimore, a minority-owned firm that won the demolition contract.
“We?re here at 6 a.m. and sometimes I don?t leave until 10 p.m.,” Ford said.
She has been in the construction business 11 years.
“When I first came out, there were only two females who ran job sites. I see a lot more women doing the job out there today,” Ford said.
