Unbuilding the Grace and Pearman Bridges
For Sparky and myself, curiosity drives passion which in turn fuels our life's engine. Our passion was capturing the story of both unbuilding the Grace (1929 - 2007) and Pearman (1966 - 2007) Bridges and discovering the unbuilders. It takes a lot of passion to track a project from July 2005 until April 2007 - rain, shine, hurricanes or moving to Singapore. We discovered the joy of discovery learning. Ken Canty opened the front door for us - then Steve Testa, Ponch Billingsley and Mickey Rogers opened many side doors. Below are the highlights of what we discovered, who we met and what we learned.
And a reminder from T.S. Eliot (East Coker from the Four Quartets)
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
From the side - waiting for action
The Pearman and Grace skeletons
Not much left of P-8, another one of Michael's unbuilding exercises
and a nice view under the Ravenel Bridge. In the background is C-2 with a drilling collar wrapped around it. Click to review the P-11 drilling collar that I watched during my June visit
Our team -
Mickey and Sparky know how to make an old man feel sad. Its for real - these tripods are not ghosts. The only ghosts are Fran's tripods.
Look at Lewis (left) and Manny (right) - looking at the prepublication version of Sparky's bridge book
and some collar building going on
Loading C-2
with the real stuff
Meet the Henry brothers and more prep for C-2
Looking back - and on to the big show
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
C. Frank Starmer