The Wonderful (and little known) Collateral Effects of Infrastructure

I originally wrote this article in April 2020 as COVID threatened to shut down the world, but it was true long before COVID, and will be true long after:

My grandfather (our founder, Herb E. Sargent) knew about community. Born in Alton, Maine in 1906 there was not a single car in this tiny rural village.?Community was all he had. His first commercial enterprise was to sell sawdust from his dad’s sawmill as insulation for local residents’ iceboxes (refrigerators wouldn’t be available on a commercial basis for another 5-10 years at the time). He was about ten years old.

About that same time, his Uncle Bob bought a car and took him on a trip to Boston. There they visited the airport to watch the "aeroplanes", something he’d only heard about at that time. They had a cold sarsaparilla while sitting on a wooden bench in front of the makeshift airport office. Commercial airlines wouldn’t start at Logan Airport (then Jeffery Field) until eleven years later. Portland, Maine's own grass runways wouldn't be constructed for five years after this visit to Boston.?

Herb went on to spend his life building infrastructure.?His company left its mark all over Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, and eventually several mid-Atlantic states, in the form of rural airports, dams, and interstates and other highways. As highway development began to accommodate demand, societal needs caught his interest and he moved to commercial and environmental work.?He never stopped building critical infrastructure, and we work hard to perpetuate his legacy.?

Herb also went on to spend his life building community.?In countless ways he supported the youth and the needy, spreading his love for community in ways most people didn’t even know.?He rarely told anyone because he did it not for accolades, but for his own spirit -- spirit we proudly and passionately embrace.?

Why am I writing this? Because the effect of essential infrastructure doesn’t stop when the yellow centerline is painted and the road is opened to traffic.?Its effects extend deeply and oftentimes anonymously into communities, saturating them with?forces of good?in ways that can’t be predicted when a piece of infrastructure is sketched out, then built.?It extends to YMCA’s and YWCA’s; Boy and Girl Scouts; United Ways; addiction recovery assistance; Habitats for Humanity; fighting cancer and recovery from its affects. Baseball, soccer and football fields constructed in-kind for local youth.?Pianos donated to music programs. Technology training for local school faculties.

In one case, infrastructure’s effect took a circuitous route through the heart of our company in the form of would-be profits and met the dreams of a 3-year-old little girl who was born without ears. A young teenager now, she smiles, literally ear-to-ear; she can hear and wear earrings, a simple childhood desire she had from watching her older sister dress up.?

Those are many, very good, collateral effects of infrastructure and similar effects are put in place by countless thousands of infrastructure builders across the United States. It’s not just the highway that’s critical and essential, it’s the underlying good that is spread and multiplied throughout our communities.?

We’re working safe; we want healthy employees.?Let’s take every precaution to keep them safe while we keep our essential infrastructure and its peripheral effects moving. We promise we'll behave in ways that respect our communities' health.