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.

April 4, 2006:
Imploding T-27 Substructure

A bit of tech stuff: StarHub in Singapore has an international phone service. For a prepaid Sim card (about $10 US) you can pop this into your GSM phone (3 frequency - compatible with Europe/Middle East/India and the Pacific except Japan and Korea) - and the cost of a phone call to the US is 10 cents/min. So I phoned Ken to ask about his ankle and got some of the details (like D-27 was the target). Also Ken must be feeling better because he took over my job of loading.

    Video for fun: Sparky sends me a group of photos and today I made a video from all of them. A bit chaotic, but at the same time it displays the strategy and Sparky and I developed as we tracked different aspects of the unbuilding processes.
  • A video summary of Sparky's adventures today - unedited
The worksite: (D-27) (Jodi - D-27 is located to the left of D-28 and a to the right of where D-26 used to be :) )

Our photo team with remote conducting from Singapore

Before

1:

2:

3:

4:

Sparky has some video and Ken and Mickey have some also. By tomorrow we should have the entire story.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

C. Frank Starmer

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