THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 10, 1996 TAG: 9607100356
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 83 lines
The old Coleman Bridge, replaced this spring after 44 years of bearing traffic across the historic York River, will be retired with a bang. Literally.
The hulking steel dinosaur will be blown up at its storage pier in a remote corner of Norfolk International Terminals on the Elizabeth River. It will later be sold as scrap, government officials and private contractors said Tuesday.
The demolition, planned for late July, promises to be a public-works spectacle, drawing the same curious crowds that watched for hours as crews pieced together the new, prefabricated Coleman Bridge like a giant erector set.
A team of experts will set charges strategically throughout the steel webbing of the 4,000-ton structure, leveling it with one orchestrated boom, said James Brookshire, assistant project manager for Tidewater Construction Corp. of Virginia Beach.
Tidewater Construction built the new $73 million Coleman Bridge, linking Yorktown with Gloucester Point, and has the job of disposing of the old one. The half-mile-long shell should collapse into the river in 26 sections, creating a huge splash and sending 200-ton chunks of steel to the bottom of the Elizabeth, Brookshire said.
A barge equipped with a giant crane will fish out the sections and carry them to an iron-works yard for reprocessing and sale, he said. The project, costing about $100,000, should take about two weeks, Brookshire estimated.
Not everyone is enthusiastic, however. At least one regulatory agency, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, is concerned that blowing up the bridge, which is loaded with lead paint, may rain environmental harm on the Elizabeth River.
``We're not sure explosives are a good idea,'' said Jay Lipscomb, who regulates waterway projects in Norfolk for the VMRC. ``We're going to have to sit down and talk about this one.''
Brookshire said he believes that all necessary permits have been obtained. However, it's unclear - even to VMRC officials - whether their agency has any say in whether the demolition takes place.
The Army Corps of Engineers has signed off on the blasting work. Diana Bailey, a corps spokeswoman in Norfolk, said lead will not be in the water long enough to pose an ecological risk, and that lubricants and other residues will be cleaned from the bridge before destruction.
Old bridges are often cut into scrap with welding torches and sunk as artificial reefs. That option was ruled out with the Coleman Bridge mostly because of the lead paint; it simply would have cost too much money to scrape it clean of the highly toxic paint, officials said.
Tidewater Construction looked into selling the old span outright, perhaps as a museum piece or as an item for an eccentric collector. But ``there wasn't a big market out there for something like this,'' Brookshire said.
Brookshire described demolition as the ``safest way to go'' for disposing of the bridge - although he noted that precautions must be made to safeguard a nearby shipping office. The company plans to remove a portion of the bridge closest to the office to reduce the chance of flying debris hitting the building.
Tons of concrete, which encompassed two lanes of roadway on top of the bridge, have been scraped away and will be accepted as buffer material on Craney Island, a dredge disposal site owned by the Army Corps in Portsmouth.
The concrete will not be submerged in the water, but will be stacked on top of other debris that acts as a breakwater, Bailey said.
At Norfolk International Terminals, a special concrete pier, where the new Coleman Bridge was built and the old span now sits, also will be demolished through blasting, Brookshire said. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
HUY NGUYEN/The Virginian-Pilot file
A portion of the old Coleman Bridge is removed in May for transport
to Norfolk International Terminals on the Elizabeth River. It is
there that the demolition is planned for late July. by CNB