September 11, 2005: 9pm
Night work removing road panels and
girders
The first surprise was that only one tower of the Ravenel Bridge was lit.
But in the meantime, the night crew was continuing to cut the roadway into
7 foot segments, remove them, cut the cross-pieces between the supporting
girders and pull pairs of girders from the supporting structure. Here
is the concrete saw - I suppose its a diamond tip blade.
Then the grapple moves in and lifts a panel (7 ft x 1/2 the road width)
higher
higher
higher
higher
higher
higher until it falls over
Then the panel is pulled away from the work site
and removed by a big-time fork lift
Then more cutting
and more cutting - and at night - with the sparks flying, its better than the
forth of July!
Its interesting with long exposures to see "shadow man"
and more shadow man
Then the grapple moves in again and rotates the panel up
and up
and up
and then picks the panel up as if picking up a pencil from the floor. These
guys really do display incredible surgical skills!
Continuing to pick up the panel
and rotate it 180 degrees and stack them for the fork lift
Then cutting the girders continues - complete with 4th of July sparklers
I suppose its obvious that this really fascinates me!
Now to start the dental process - extracting a pair of girders. First
a pair of cables is attached to the grapple
and the other end to the girders
Another view of attaching the cables to the girders.
and then the grapple stabilizes the girders while the final cutting continues
(I think Rick Beauchamp is driving the 345 here and you can see his head
inside the cab.
A few more adjustments
and then the big pull - just like a simple tooth extraction - except
this tooth weighs several tons
Pulling up a little
Then lifting and pulling
and pulling and lifting a bit more
then pulling back a bit more
and then pulling the pair of girders out of the work site
for removal sometime later (tomorrow?)
A bit more of pulling the girders
And finally, the extraction and clean-up is complete. Now
There is a gap where the tooth was and its time to
cut and remove the next pair of girders
I am quite impressed with the safety of these procedures. In many
photos, you can see the tie-down cables and these guys are like
high wire artists with torches.