Cortney maps out career as a 'roads scholar'
Published on 22 August, 2011
On the surface, she's fresh-faced, feminine and petite. But Cortney Scotney already has experience sorting out road crews competing for gravel deliveries and knows her way around a bitumen project.
The 21-year-old Civil Engineering student is only a year away from graduation from her 'Co-op' program with CQUniversity. She just has to squeeze in a research project to help Main Roads monitor the performance of 'bitumen treated base'.
This time next year, Cortney will be starting three-years of rotation through various departments of Main Roads. Her scholarship program provided paid work with Main Roads and RoadTek during her degree, while enabling her to work in private industry along the way.
Straight out of high school, Cortney was juggling her university studies with nine months' work scheduling projects for Boral Asphalt.
"Boral supplies bitumen services on both government and private jobs and my role was to schedule and program the jobs, organising everything from what people are needed, to equipment, to accommodation, to food. I did that for two crews in Rocky and one crew in Mackay."
More recently, Cortney has been working across four RoadTek flood reconstruction projects, scheduling deliveries of roadbase materials and the various sizes of small aggregate rocks needed for skid-resistance once the bitumen goes down (the little rocks come in 7mm, 10mm, 14mm and 16mm sizes).
"If a particular project area wants something it can become a sort of a competition so I'm the middle man who works what's best for the whole of the four areas," she says.
It's not all about road construction and servicing. Cortney has previously had experience with the Main Roads planning office helping with upgrades to intersections, road widening, and even speed sign changes and crash/safety analysis. She will get to work with more detailed design levels of projects in a future rotation with Main Roads.
After growing up in the rural idyll of Theodore and boarding at girls' school in Yeppoon, Cortney is finding being a 'roads scholar' takes her to plenty of other parts of Queensland.
Next stop is the Roma region for her pavement design research, featuring the 'bitumen treated base' rehabilitation process.
Cortney explains that this process is more expensive than other rehabilitation processes, but it uses natural gravel from the work site rather than trucking in 'non-renewable' rock material, so it's more sustainable.
"The end result is stronger while still being granular and flexible. but we still need to work out the best specifications for future Main Roads projects."
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