THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702230185
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 164 lines
Coaxing the freight-train-size pile driver into place takes all the precision of satellite signals and the power of huge diesel engines.
But then, Gary Kershaw admits, ``Sometimes you have to use a little body English. Sometimes you have to use strong words.''
He eases off with his left foot, jams back the right lever, bumps the throttle just a little and, majestically, the whole apparatus locks into place.
``There it is.''
And then, with the sound that has become the daily, pulsating rock beat of the Chesapeake Beach shoreline, the desk-size hammer rises and falls. Chuh, boom! Chuh, boom!
Now more than a mile off the shoreline, the crane barge named the ``George Johnson'' is moving rapidly across the 17-mile mouth of the Bay, adding 150 feet each day to the new span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
On shore, the sound and the reverberations are fading. Dogs no longer crawl under beds.
``It's not as bad as everyone imagined it would be,'' says Eleanor Kelley, who lives on Lauderdale Avenue next to the new bridge span.
The computer in Mia Bragg's upstairs office two doors from the ramp used to jump with each fall of the hammer. Now, she says, the sound, muffled by the evening damp, is almost mesmerizing. ``It's kind of an eerie feeling when it's so far off. It lulls you.''
On the barge, an ever-moving outpost, there is no such lull.
The small crew of eight or nine leaves the company dock at the Little Creek pre-fab yard and rides out in a work boat to the barge at 6:30 a.m. During the next 12 hours they hoist six of the 100-foot-long, steel-reinforced cement piles and drive them into the Bay-bottom sand.
At times, especially when the wind turns around to the north, the barge rolls, the crane sways and the 100-ton piles move ominously. ``Doin' the hucklebuck'' is how Kershaw, 57, a Georgia transplant, describes it.
``It can get right scary,'' he says.
Through the window of his cab, the long bend in the piles as they march across the Bay is visible. Soon they will be capped and pre-cast sections of roadbed will be riveted, three-abreast, on top.
Kershaw is working a double crane, a ``ringer'' that rides 360 degrees around on a wide track smeared with grease.
Below, Erskin Griffin works the pile driver with the help of two chugging air compressors. The 5-foot swing of the hammer is accompanied by a spray of water to keep the cap over the pile cool. Each blow drives the hollow tube 6 inches or so into the sand, then maybe 4, then nothing.
Griffin drives it until what the engineers call ``refusal'' occurs - it hits bedrock. Kershaw lifts the giant pile driver off the piles and swings it around, delicately laying it in a cradle on the barge.
Now all three piles are poking out of the water and the trickiest part of the operation begins. It takes the brains of engineers, the eyes of satellites, the muscle and bravery of bridge workers and an unexpectedly simple carpenter's tool.
It is time for the barge, along with the template for the piles, to move another 75 feet northward. Not 74 feet or even 74 and three-quarters.
The template is a huge, four-legged steel platform with three holes to place piles through.
Kris Bjornson balance beams to the outer edge of the template and places two global positioning antennas on poles. Then he retreats to the onboard shack and checks the position on his computer.
Tom Walker, operating a second ``crawler'' crane, grabs the four legs of the template, one at a time, and vibrates them out of their beds on the bottom.
In a glass-enclosed booth overlooking the operation, barge boss Jim Colgrove calls Kershaw on the UHF radio, band 68.
``Stand by, Gary.''
``OK, captain, here we go,'' the crane operator replies and the whole, ungainly, 98-ton apparatus lifts out of the water.
``That's quite a monstrosity, isn't it?'' Colgrove says, not without admiration.
With the template now suspended in air, Colgrove begins manipulating the barge, turning it loose from shoreward anchors and, with powerful winches, tugging on seaward anchors, inching the barge, the crane, the template and crew out to sea.
He's got an eye on a computer screen that shows two shapes, one of the barge and one of the footprint where the barge is supposed to move.
He's manipulating hundreds of tons of machinery and concrete through the water to a spot that must be no more than 14/100ths of an inch off. A tug on the port anchors, a swing of the stern to port or starboard, the jamming of brakes and the lines begin to merge and become one.
``Take it! Take it!'' he yells into a hand-held microphone.
And Kershaw lowers the monster into place.
Colgrove fires up a Marlboro Light and watches as the crew fine-tunes the template, raising one leg then another as they get the height, about 14 feet off the Bay surface, just right.
``They're basking in the glory right now,'' he says of the workers who daily wrestle with the devil as the bridge falls into place.
``They know their work is being recognized.''
There's another side to it: not just precision but tough, hard work, out on the water, in dangerous conditions at times. Pushing and shoving heavy objects, firing up noisy machines, putting something tangible and lasting in place.
``Big boys, big toys,'' admits Colgrove.
``There's a certain breed of guy that it attracts,'' says Doug Walters, the safety boss who is watching the work. ``There's no way to get around it: This work is dangerous work.''
But he adds, ``We all want our names on this bridge.''
The parallel crossing of the bridge-tunnel, sometimes called one of the engineering marvels of the world, is not much different from the original: concrete supporting concrete.
The $200 million project, begun in late 1995, includes new bridge roadways only. Tunnels, far more costly, are planned for the future. Even though traffic will funnel into the existing tunnels, the widened lanes, including shoulders, are expected to speed traffic when completed in 1999.
Most of the work so far has been on the northern end, but the Chesapeake Beach side has begun to feel its presence. Last week, the crew passed the one-mile mark on the bridge span.
Kershaw was 14 when he and his family, lured by construction work, got off a bus from Georgia and ended up in Great Bridge. He was 21 when he got one of the biggest jobs of his life, running a crane for the original bay-bridge tunnel. He helped build the islands and lay the tunnel tubes.
He and Raymond Gray, now equipment manager for the project, are veterans of the original. Gray still wears the blue metallic hard hat he wore in the '60s.
``If I can make this one, I'm not going to worry about the third one, oh my gracious,'' he says, grinning under the peak of a maroon cap that says B.C. Burton, Little Boat Harbor.
``It's a lot different being 57 than when I was 21, I'll tell you.''
A cool breeze begins blowing from the northeast, ruffling the long brown hair jutting from Ricky Brown's hard hat as he stands on one of the remaining piles. He directs Kershaw with quick hand signals as the crane swings around.
``I've never been able to do what them guys are doing,'' Kershaw says as Brown and another man clamber over the piles and cinch one of them with heavy cables.
``Them damn things are heavy.''
You wouldn't know this, except that the cab shudders as Kershaw engages the clutch and begins to lift the concrete column off the deck like a great obelisk being raised.
The orange paint on its side reads 92 feet. It's hard to believe the column, 54 inches wide, swinging just slightly as it lifts straight up, can be driven 60 feet into the Bay bottom.
But pipes running alongside the pile begin forcing water under massive pressure into the sand, digging a hole for the bridge structure.
The pile slides through the center template hole and Brown dances around it with a hand-held level, making sure the 100-ton pile guided in place by not one but five satellites, is straight.
``Imagine,'' Kershaw says in wonder. ``All this high-tech stuff and you use a level!''
The hammer is raised and the beat goes on. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/The Virginian-Pilot
Robert Ruland, 26, helps lower a girder for the north-bound section
of the new Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel Thursday. The crew is adding
about 150 feet each day to the span. The rhythmic sounds of
construction, now that they are more distant, are called
``mesmerizing'' by one woman whose office is within earshot.
Gary Kershaw, 57, operates the crane on the George Johnson barge.
Kershaw also worked on the original Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
project in the 1960s.
Photo by D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/The Virginian-Pilot
Workers on the crane of the George Johnson barge drive pilings for
the new northbound lanes that are being constructed for the
Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Construction should be finished by
late 1999.
KEYWORDS: CHESAPEAKE BAY BRIDGE TUNNEL CONSTRUCTION EXPANSION