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.

October 17, 2006: 995 Cleanup and Chris Vocci on the move

Looks kind of like Singapore - except in Charleston, the overcast is natural whereas the haze here is from forest fires in Indonesia - just now, Charleston is the place to be!
Here is the worksite - the 995 picking up pieces of T-3 (aka Frank)

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And this is how the J. Cashman (995) does it - first reaching into the water

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Picking up a scopper of debris and rotating

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Rotating

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Rotating

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Pre-dumping

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and serious dumping

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Then another scoop

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Meanwhile adjacent to the Sea Breeze, Chris Vocci and a couple of our iron worker acrobats are busy working on the next support

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Here is the support and Chris' 7550

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Tieing it

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Connecting

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and Chris - doing his thing

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

C. Frank Starmer

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