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Cory Wilson
Early in the morning of November 11, a fiery accident occurred between two semis on the Brent Spence Bridge. Those in the area who rely on that bridge to get to work on a daily basis found themselves looking for alternate routes that they could tolerate as the bridge was being inspected and repaired. While Pendleton County has known for years that Nancy Wood, a native of the county, has held the role of communicating for Highway District 6 as various projects and problems have occurred on its roads, a new face came onto the scene as the Brent Spence repair project commenced.
That face belongs to Pendleton County native and 2004 Pendleton County High School graduate Cory Wilson. His role? To lead the team that is working to repair the bridge.
Looking back, Wilson recognizes that he had a knack for engineering early in his life. “My dad is a mechanic, so I was always interested how things were put together. I wanted to know how things worked. I would take things apart and put them back together, stuff like that.”
So when his dad Richard Wilson, who also works for the Kentucky Department of Transportation, told him about a transportation scholarship for engineering, he decided to go for it. He got the scholarship and attended UK’s civil engineering program. He started the program in fall of 2004 and finished in three and one-half years.
“That scholarship pretty much laid out my decision,” he admits.
“I worked a couple summers in Falmouth with Doug Gosney and Nathan Fields,” he remembered. “Then I worked a couple of years full-time in Georgetown in construction and maintenance.”
He ended up working in Georgetown a total of six years. “I moved into the section office after a couple of years in Georgetown overseeing maintenance and construction—any state highway construction. I managed inspection personnel and resolved issues with contractors and made sure they got paid. A lot of that was pothole repair and tree removal. I coordinated grants, too.”
After his time in Georgetown, he transferred to Lexington for three years. After that, he transferred to Covington to become Transportation Engineer Branch Manager of Highway District 6 in the Covington office. This means he manages two section offices—Burlington and, of course, Covington, which led him into overseeing the Brent Spence repair project.
He has worked on some pretty major projects, he said, but none of them compares to the challenge he is facing now.
“Other projects have involved either huge amounts of money or limited time frames. I was involved with the project that widened New Circle when I was in Lexington and the Newtown Pike extension project. On that one, we built the road and dealt with a lot of obstacles like utilities and abandoned tanks. After I came to Covington, I worked with the Pleasant Valley Road project in Boone County. It was a $23 million project and it had a lot of moving parts. It took years instead of weeks. And we just finished the I-275 project and the cut-in-the-hill. The challenge there was how to keep traffic moving safely and efficiently while you do the work—how do you manage the traffic flow in high-traffic areas?
“But the Brent Spence Bridge has the pressure of a short time frame. We need to get the thing back open safely.”
While it is a stressful project that involves early starts to his days (he starts what most of us consider to be the middle of the night) and late nights for him, he seems to relish the opportunity, as bad as the problem is.
“It’s exciting to be part of. It involves a lot of problem solving—how to pull things together. It’s good to work with everybody to solve a lot of issues.
“This is stuff you go to school for."