Changing the face of Charleston : Watch the unbuilding (demolition) of the Grace and Pearman Bridges
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Satellite and Associated Imagery of the construction site

Tim Linder has a great idea - locating satellite imagery of the construction site. He has located this USGS Satellite Image of the Cooper River and Bridges for 1999. In addition, the US Geological Survey has a very useful JAVA image browser for their LandSat images. This link includes southern South Carolina. After clicking on the USGS link in the previous sentence, wait for the image browser to load and then click and drag the Charleston region to the center of the image browser and then click on the "Resolution" menu near the top and change the resolution to 240 meters (default is 1000 meters).

Anyone have any ideas about satellite imagery from 2003 - 2005 showing the same region:
(Lat 32.80316 Long -79.91360) ?

1999

From NASA: Image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.
February 3, 2003

I cropped the above NASA image around the Cooper River Bridge construction site and did a little color enhancement. The James Island Connector (big white "S") is quite dramatic.

October 5, 2003 with some color enhancement of another NASA image. Note the "S" shaped James Island Connector to the left

February 16, 2005 Almost completed the main span with a lot of cloud cover

October 13, 2003:
Terraserver.com has graciously contributed this 2 meter resolution satellite image of the bridge construction site - (click for the high resolution image). You can clearly see the east and west on ramp work as well as the east and west pylon construction.

February 24, 1946: A collision with the Grace Memorial Bridge

John Baxley, an aerial photographer for the past 25+ years, found this in his archives. I was unaware of the history of the Grace Memorial bridge and that there had been a collisions, but here it is, from the Post and Courier, 1946. (Tim Linder, a frequent contributor to our project did a little image magic and dramatically improved the quality of the original half-tone image.

Johns original image and Tim's enhanced image.
Click each image for a full presentation.

Click to view all unbuilding web page segments

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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