Changing the face of Charleston : The unbuilding of the Grace and Pearman Bridges
Frank's Internet Home Page
Blog: 2005
Archives of unbuilding sections
Blog: 2006
The story of building the Ravenel Bridge
Visit our
Adventures in Singapore
Click to view all web page segments
I enjoy hearing from you. If you have comments and suggestions, write me.


Unbuilding Highlights
(Apr 10)
Meeting St. Stories
(Jul 10 2006)
East Bay Stories
(Oct 10 2006)
Drum Island Stories
(Feb 17)
Pearman Bridge Stories
(Apr 3)
Grace Bridge Stories
(Apr 3)
Imposions: Prep and boom
(Mar 27)
Unbuilding Bridge Blog
(July 23 2006)
Unbuilding Challenges
(Mar 13)
Learning Links
(Feb 20)
Unbuilding Stories
(Mar 13)
Video and Sounds
(Feb 28)

October 11, 2005:
Dropping the Town Creek segment of the Pearman Bridge.

I was out of town this week (bad timing) and thanks to many - we accumulated a good collections of video and still images - Amy Spires and her daughter, Miranda, captured the event with video: Pearman Blast (6 Mb AVI video) while Bryant Stowe and Sparky Witte captured individual photos.

As I understand the process, the goal was to drop the truss section as 11 segments between the pins that link the truss to the cantilevered segments as described from looking at the Pearman segment from the Grace Bridge. The buoys would mark each of the 11 segments.

This is the before - as seen from Sparky's boat

and this is just after as seen from Bryant Stowe's location

Here you can see that the left 3 segments broke up according to plan while the right 8 segments remained connected

A different view from Sparky's boat

And at about the same time from Bryant's vantage point

And down they fell

Spash

Lots of sound and smoke (fury) - signifying quite a bit

This is a good view of the after - with the remaining cantilevered segments still projecting beyond their supports on the left and right

Click to view all unbuilding web page segments

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Attribution: C. Frank Starmer and Sparky Witte from http://oldcooperriverbridge.org