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, 2006: Unbuilding the Coleman Recycle Center

As the end nears, cleanup and rebuilding is in full swing. Today, Sparky started at what I called the Coleman Recycle Center - the convergence of Coleman Blvd and the Grace on-ramp. Here the Grace entrance road is being unbuilt. The basic process is: Grab

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Pickup

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Lift

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Lift and rotate

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Deposit in a waiting dump truck

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Offload the chunk of asphault

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Slowly

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and carefully

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Pickup the grapple

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then back to get the next chunk of roadway

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When filled, the dump truck carries the stuff to its new home

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and slowly raises the truck bed

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and the asphault slides off

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until empty. Then repeat

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

C. Frank Starmer

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