New Elwha River bridge dwarfs men who build it
A concrete arch frames one of the new Elwha River bridge’s concrete towers as workers assemble another on the other side of the river. -- Photo by Chris Tucker/Peninsula Daily News
By Jim Casey, Peninsula Daily News
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The tiny men atop the 85-foot concrete columns on the banks of the Elwha River couldn't have built these mammoth structures.
Could they?
A visit to the construction site for the new Elwha River Road bridge is to suffer a serious dislocation in the scale with which we perceive things made by humans.
In about a year, a two-lane span for motor vehicles will cross the Elwha canyon with a footbridge slung beneath it to carry hikers and cyclists on the Olympic Discovery Trail.
Until then, crews for Parsons RCI of Sumner will perform a giant's balancing act.
Beginning at each of the towers on each shore, they'll build one section of bridge deck into thin air toward the land.
They'll repeat the cantilevering process with a balancing section of deck over the water, then one toward the land again, then another over the water.
A meeting in midair
Eventually, the decks will meet in the middle and reach roads on each shore.
The $16.4 million span will replace the creaky one-lane trestle over the Elwha that state officials closed in the wake of the catastrophic collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis.
The Elwha's eastern bank is the site of a small construction city for Parsons and DelHur Industries of Port Angeles.
The latter firm is building a new Port Angeles municipal water plant downstream.
The area is stacked with sections of scaffolding, piles of pipe, stacks of steel girders and mounds of lumber.
As for the bridge, its towers are only half exposed.
They are rooted 83 feet below the surface, said Pat McElroy, a Clallam County Public Works Department project engineer on the bridge.
'Fair to middling' crane
While visitors watch, a crane with a 210-foot-long boom lifts a column form to the top of a tower.
McElroy calls the behemoth machine "fair to middling."
For all the bridge's size and the bustle of the work, the river below still rules this canyon.
Running milky green with recent runoff, its roar over rapids drowns out the noise of the machines.
Bridge completion is scheduled for June 2009.
In the meantime, McElroy says as he searches for an osprey that still comes to perch above the river, "there's not a better place to work."
________
Reporter Jim Casey can be reached at 360-417-3538 or at jim.casey@peninsuladailynews.com.
Last modified: June 29. 2008 9:00PM