Blew up my office today

[Sarge 3,470]

Been working on a bridge demolition project - we've been doing pre-cut work on the main beams, torching out the flanges and setting up places for the explosives team. For the past week or so - this has been my view...

 

 

 

 

Shot the first two spans today, detonation starts around 2:17 in the video.

Sorry for the lack of quality, I'm over 800ft away and sitting 40' in the air in a man lift, with it running. Never thought about my arm resting on the console - evidently, its vibration was fighting the phone's video stabilization.

 

 

 

Sometime in the next week the rest of the main spans will go down, the largest being the center one over the Illinois River, right in the navigation lane. The demo company will have a crane staged to immediately start retrieving those sections out of the water.

In the meantime, back to burning iron to prep the rest of the last two north spans.

 

Sarge

Edited August 15, 2018 by Sarge
missed pics

[Pullstart 68,119]

Looks like a blast!  Yep, pun intended 

[CasualObserver 3,411]

@Sarge is that that skinny-ass old bridge on 89 coming up from Varna and McNabb? Used to take that a lot when I lived down in Goodfield, between Peoria and Bloomington. Wasn`t as bad as that one they just replaced at Savanna. Did you get to work on that one?

[AMC RULES 37,232]

Long overdue...

the state of our infrastructure is a mess. 

[Sarge 3,470]

Yeah, it was that super skinny Penn truss on the south side of Spring Valley - lot of local folks were afraid to cross it. I didn't work on the Savannah bridge project - well outside of my district. 

 

 

There were a lot of mixed feelings around here about it's demise, but the thing was far too narrow for the traffic volume and badly rusted out in quite a few areas. As with many things, this one should have been taken down around 20yrs ago and replaced - we're that far behind in our infrastructure. You'd think the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minnesota would have taught a lesson, but it did not. 

 

Sarge

 

 

[Cvans 1,009]

Now that was a nice clean blow. 

[Sarge 3,470]

All we could ask for was the sections dropped straight down and didn't hit the new bridge sitting next to it - all went perfectly. Next week, if all goes well the main span over the river and 2 smaller ones will go down in one shot. Excavator with a shear has already munched up the first of the two spans dropped Tuesday, the other one should be done today.

 

Sarge