Plaistow Man Helps Construct New Visitor Center
By Daniel Remin
WASHINGTON — Stand at the top of the Capitol’s Senate steps, and you will see bulldozers and builders hard at work constructing the new Capitol Visitor Center.
For Plaistow native Duane Dumont, who is working on the underground project, just being here is the opportunity of a lifetime.
“I love it down here,” Dumont said. “It’s got lots of excitement. I love politics, and where better to go than the capital? There’s all kinds of things to do. My wife (Fran) and I, we’ve traveled all over the country. One of the last areas we really haven’t spent any time is in the D.C. area.”
Describing his opportunity to help build the center, Dumont said, “How can you pass up history?”
The center is being built under the Capitol’s East Front and, when it is completed, it will include exhibit space, theaters and an auditorium, all to provide visitors with information about Congress..
Working for Gilbane Construction, the company building the center, the burly Dumont is the senior mechanical coordinator for the project. In that role, he handles the mechanical, electrical and plumbing aspects of the construction.
Dumont said a 30-inch waterline that consists of nearly 3,000 yards of piping has been installed, and work is underway on a utility tunnel that will serve as the entranceway to the center.
Dumont has worked in construction for 23 years, and his job has allowed him to travel, one of his favorite hobbies. “The best part of my job is they pay me to travel,” he said. “Wherever we’ve gone, there’s a lot of beautiful stuff to see.”
Dumont has lived and worked all over America, from the bustling streets and cities of the Northeast to the vast deserts and forests of the West. Arizona is his favorite place.
“It’s just so much history,” he said. “I love history, and when you go up in that area, you see the Indians, you see the four points, where you have four states come together, you got the Grand Canyon, you have dinosaur tracks. We spend a lot of time outdoors just doing different types of historic stuff like that.”
His love of travel goes beyond where his work has taken him. Two years ago, he surprised his wife with a trip to Hawaii for their 20th wedding anniversary. Fran Dumont said she “loved” it.
Dumont came to the capital about six months ago to work on the center. Before that, he helped construct Building 220, a Pfizer research lab in Groton, Conn., that at the time was the biggest of its kind, he said. More recently, he worked on Nashua North High School. There, he became interested in the Senate campaign of then-House member John E. Sununu, R., N.H.
“I knew his views, and I was just giving views out, and I turned a lot of votes his way,” Dumont said.
Later, he met the new senator. “It’s just that way. One day, I see him here (Washington), and I congratulate him for being here,” Dumont said. “That’s how it all started.”
Sununu, in a statement, recalled the meeting: “As I was walking across the plaza one morning, a man with a Gilbane Construction helmet stepped up and said, ‘Good morning, Senator Sununu.’ As I shook his hand, he mentioned that he was from Plaistow. It’s always great to see a friendly face from New Hampshire and particularly nice to see involvement in such a significant project.”
Dumont brings much experience and expertise to a job he loves.
“He’s very knowledgeable, so I’m actually learning a lot from him,” said Donna Nottingham, assistant superintendent for the center project. “He’s funny, fun to be around. He keeps in tune with what’s going on.”
Near a street filled with parked cars across from the Russell Senate Office Building sits one of the main feeders for the waterline. Pointing this out, Dumont recalled that parking was banned on the street for some time while workers dug underground to install the pipes.
“That made us very popular on the Senate side,” he joked.
Dumont, 43, is a graduate of Timberlane Regional High School in Plaistow and attended the University of New Hampshire’s business management school. He got his start in construction working with his brother, who did sheet metal work. Dumont ended up building “clean rooms,” the uncontaminated rooms used to manufacture products for pharmaceutical companies and computer chip producers, such as Intel and IBM.
Even when he’s not on the job, Dumont likes to do construction work. One of his hobbies is building houses, and he has built two in Maine, his wife’s home state.
He and Fran, married 22 years, are living in a half-finished townhouse they bought in Woodbridge, Va., a Washington suburb. Dumont said he’s going to finish it while he is working in Washington.
“He just shows really good commitment to issues he believes in, he’s a really hard worker, a good family man,” Fran said.
The couple has one child, Ethan, 20, a Marine Corps communications officer stationed in Okinawa. Dumont also has a stepdaughter, Jessica, 26, who lives in Boston and is a faculty assistant at Harvard.
As Dumont talks about his son, he opens his jacket to reveal the Marine Corps shirt he is wearing. He says because Ethan is stationed near North Korea, he is not worried that his son will be deployed to Iraq.
As for his own safety in Washington, with the never-ending warnings of terrorist threats, Dumont said he is not too concerned.
“I look at the terrorist threats just like I look at my life,” he said. “I could cross the street tomorrow and get hit by a car, so why worry about it?”
Sitting in the construction trailer, his cleanly cropped gray hair slicked back, his hard hat off for the moment, Dumont reflects on his home state. As much as he likes Washington, he said, he prefers the Granite State.
“I wouldn’t want to live here forever because (there are) too many people,” he said. “Traffic is a big killer. New Hampshire, you’re an hour away from the mountains. Seacoasts. I’m big on the ocean, big on the mountains, and you’re a half hour, hour away from one or from the other.”
However, there are other elements that make Washington more attractive than the often-frigid New England area.
“If I was living in Maine, we’d be bundled up in jackets wondering when the snow’s going to melt,” Dumont said. Reflecting on a recent trip to nearby Virginia, he said, “Two weeks ago, my wife and I took our two dogs to Manassas, and we were walking the battlefields in T-shirts, seeing history.”
His workday lasts 10 hours, and that should soon increase to 12 hours or more once construction of the main building begins. But he does not mind the long hours, the temporary position or the interim stay in the nation’s capital, he said.
“The best part I find working in construction, you have your small type (job), where you’re always in the same spot,” he said. “Then, you have your bigger jobs. Those are my type of jobs. Usually, you have to go to an area to do it. A good example is D.C. It’s a three- to five-year job, so I’m guaranteed that I’m going to be in a new location three to five years, and in that time, I can do all the traveling in that area and see all the historic sites.”
(Daniel Remin is an intern with the Boston University Washington News Service.)
Published in The Manchester Union Leader, in New Hampshire.
