While walking through Richmond, we came along a street of older houses in what seemed like quite a desirable neighborhood. The dominant feature of most of these houses was the preponderance of wisteria on their frontages. Some of the plants were confined to one house while others seemed to span whatever property that they felt like. The purple blooms were most impressive, and it seemed like they were competing to see which house could be more purple than the next. I don’t know how long wisteria blooms for so did we get lucky with our timing, or could we have been there at a wider range of times?
Tag Archives: street
Burning Off Neighborhood Gas
Working from home introduces you to sounds from the street that you never normally hear when you are there outside working hours. Nancy knows all of these things since she hears them all the time but they are new to me. However, we were both taken aback by something that sounded like a roaring noise. I had to investigate. It appears that the power company was doing some work digging up the road outside our street. I guess they had to cut in to a gas line and they had set up some device, presumably to burn off excess gas before continuing their work. It was only a brief event but a noisy one!
Pokémon Anyone?
I visited Akihabara twice while in Japan. Once was for a meeting with a client company that was based there and the other was when I was exploring. This area is known for a lot of entertainment associated with animation and it has a lot of visitors that are into comics and animation. It also seemed to have a large number of people playing Pokémon Go judging by the way they were all standing around playing with their phones. I did see one guy with a phone and a tablet in both hands so he could play two games at once I guess. I’ve never played the game so I can’t speak to whether it is good or not but it still seems to be really popular.
And It’s Attached
You should have seen the video of the move by now. The effort to float the new span into place was pretty impressive. The joints are a tight tolerance to be met but you are moving a large barge with a tug to get them there and those are not the most subtle of tools. however, a combination of the big pushes from the tug and putting lines on to the other moored barges allowed the team to carefully control the position of the barge and get the span in to place.
This was a popular thing. It happened mid morning on a sunny day so plenty of people came out to see it. TV crews were running around near me filming it and I was trying to get along the river to get different angles while still having the time lapse running in one spot (and hopefully nobody stealing the camera on the tripod while I am not looking). The TV camera operator I was chatting to was a lot of fun. They had been told to come out but not told too much. However, they were glad to be watching something fun rather than filming the less happy sides of city news.
With the barge in place, the crews got to work attaching the span. The first task was the bolt the lower spar in to place. The crews were climbing over these area getting the bolts in place. There seemed to be a large contingent of people standing watching this happen. Far more seemed to be watching rather actually doing anything at this point but I imagine a fair number of city people wanted to see such a high profile job get done.
The last step would be to put the remaining structure in place to complete the truss. That had to be done so the span could then support itself.
In to Place She Goes
The movement of the bridge in to its new location finally went ahead after a lot of waiting on my part. While I was shooting stills, I did set up a second camera to get a time lapse of the move. Below you can see things a lot faster than they were at the time.
Getting Ready for the New Span
Once the old part of the bridge is cut away, the next step is getting the remaining part of the bridge ready to accept the new structure. The original construction of the bridge involves having the metalwork riveted together. In the run up to the replacement program, it appears that the team have progressively removed the individual rivets in the sections that will be part of the new joint and replace them with bolts. Then, when the structure is cut, it is possible to unbolt the stubs left after the cuts.
With the sections removed, some preparation was necessary for the surfaces that would be part of the new joints with the mating surfaces and the bolt holes being coated. A bunch of cleaning up was also required so the team were moving around these joints on cherry pickers with power tools to clean and prep the surfaces.
The final step was to bolt in place some additional structure that would serve to guide the new span into place when it was floated in to position. All of this took a lot longer than I expected. One visit at night looked like a lot of things we ready. I talked to some of the crew to find out when the move would take place. They thought it would all be done overnight. I debated whether I was prepared to stay up all night to watch it and decided that wasn’t a good idea.
I was glad I made that decision. I awoke early the next morning and headed around and the new span was not yet moved. I was glad to know I hadn’t missed it. Indeed, the prep work was still being finished off. In the end, one of the guys came by and advised of the timing of the lunch break for that shift so I knew that I had time before the move and could head home and get some breakfast!
Meanwhile, there were a few guys cutting up sections of the old span. Not sure what their plan was but the cutting work always looks great at night.
Wells Street Bridge Part Two
Here we find ourselves repeating some previous posts. Hopefully, this will be slightly different. A while back I posted about the replacement of the south span of the Wells Street Bridge. You can look back at the previous posts here and here. During the previous replacement, I got half of the story. I saw the original span being cut free and moved out of place. Sadly, I had to be out of town for the rest of the week and did not see the new span being put in place and attached.
This time it all happened a bit in reverse for me. I was sure I was going to be around to see the new span put in place. What I hadn’t counted on was that they were a lot quicker removing the original span. By the time I made my first visit, the original section had been cut free and floated off to be moored along the river. I was a bit annoyed at myself but I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that the second time around they would have found out ways of doing it all a bit more quickly.
One of the things I did find fun was looking at the cuts that had been made to remove the old section. The jagged metal edges look very cool, particularly when you contemplate how long that structure has been sitting across the Chicago River.
Video of S Wells Lift
As with a lot of my helicopter postings, there were pictures in the original post and now I am following up with some video. I guess that is as much explanation as is required. Here you go.
http://youtu.be/syE4bRkZxds[\embed]
And the First Piece is Away!
As I mentioned before, the first piece was free. I hadn’t planned for a time lapse. I had no idea I was going to time my visit for when this happened, nor that it was going to happen so soon. However, I was there with the camera on a tripod so I manually shot a sequence and cut it together. It is short but you get the idea. I left town shortly after this so missed the new section being put in place. I shall hope to be around when the second span is worked on.
Cutting Through the Night
I headed back to the work site later the same day to see how things were progressing. I wanted to know how fast things were moving but I also wanted to see the work at night. The cutting torches they are using provide a great shower of sparks but, during the day, it is hard to make that impression since they are not very conspicuous. If they were cutting at night, I figured the effect would be more pronounced. That certainly was the case.
Moreover, they had got a lot further than I had expected. The section was almost totally cut free. It was now rest on the barge ready to be moved when the final cuts were made. As you can see from above, it wasn’t long before this happened. They really had made swift work of the first stage of the task.