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.

December 13, 2005:
Moving the jack-up barge

Yesterday the jackup barge removed M-7 and today the platform has been dropped to the water surface and is being positioned to remove M-8. Here is an overview of the worksite.

Meanwhile on the Pearman, Bob's group is still harvesting concrete roadway segments. Here you can see the yesterday's shoulder is absent as well as the right side of the roadway.

The left side shoulder and roadway has also been removed.

Remember the language lesson from yesterday - Ted, in southern and Michigan english is heard as Tad in Boston english. Well yesterday's translation was harvested by Jackie and will soon join other shoulder segments as another underwater reef is built

and a last view of cousin Arthur watching the jack-up barge move into position

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

C. Frank Starmer

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