Draglines, Deadlines, and Do-or-Die Picks

The city of Buffalo has a sewer treatment facility on Squaw Island. It shared the area with a garbage incinerator and ash dump.
To expand the sewer treatment plant, they needed a new perimeter road along with a railroad siding.
George was successful in bidding the project. The work area had ash waste that was to be excavated and filled with select fill which was mined out of the North side of the island. To accomplish this, we needed a large dragline, along with dozers, loaders, and a brand new Poclain (French) hydraulic excavator.
The road access to the island was the Ferry Street lift bridge, with a 12-ton limit and the Canadian National rail bridge with a very narrow cantilevered road deck, which was available to light trucks only. This was the access for garbage trucks but was not used by the contractor.
That bridge said the equipment had to be loaded on railroad flat cars in Black Rock and we loaded on the island.
One setback was while excavating with the big Poclain, the main electric line feeding the incinerator got in the way, much like gas lines today. As a result, the garbage system for all of Buffalo came to a halt. The next day, it was back up and running, and George was told any costs were on his checkbook. I’m sure he had a miserable Saturday thinking of the overtime waste he was paying for the whole sanitation department to catch up on the lost day.
The humorous part was George, Tony Riforgiat, and Fred Geltz were watching the operation when the sparks flew on both sides of the bucket and Don Pritcher came up with four feet of electric cable.
Another first for UCC was subbase stone delivered by boat. As I recall, the max load we could get over Ferry Street was maybe six tons. George and Bart decided to look into boat delivery. At the time, Standard Slag Co. of Ohio had a facility that loaded boats at Marblehead, Ohio. Self-unloading boats had been around for a while but were pretty rare to see. One day, Fred sent me and my Hough down by the sewer plant on the Black Rock Canal to wait for the boat. Along came the Crispin Oglebay, who came to a halt with crew guys lowering a boat, coming ashore, hooking lines to me, and started dragging Howser lines of the boat. Got one hooked to the 977, second one to me, and swung the converger out, pulled itself in, and dropped a load of 2” crusher run. Today boats run around 35,000 tons. I’m guessing 25-30 thousand on this load.
The captain treated George and Fred to lunch, and then hustled them out, saying he had to beat another boat to grab a load down river to make the voyage profitable. I’m guessing coke from Tonawanda.
Dick Road between Broadway and Walden was another A list project for George. Dick Road was an at grade railroad crossing and the project was to build a railroad structure with Dick Road passing under the tracks.
To handle storm water a 4-foot sewer was installed from the bridge site South, under Broadway railroad lines and Indian road on through the landfill to Cayuga Creek. There were a dozen houses and commercial buildings to demolish, and the project was bringing Ellicott Road to a dead end so a new access to Broadway was built to the West of Dick Road. (Old Indian Road.)
The landfills on Broadway and Indian Road wanted all the dirt for cover. This enabled us to excavate through the winter. The method was to push with big dozers and load with a Cat 983 with wet sticky materials. Two buckets would fill the tandem dump trucks. The only setback was the time it took to clean the tracks in the winter. After paying a crew of four or five guys an hour or more every night, George came up with a high-pressure pump on a water truck, Ut stayed in the warm shop, came out and in a half hour everything was spotless.
Higgins Erectors set the bridge. The crane they had was at its limit, and the night before the pick, the operator brought up a valid concern. The crane needed a high number of “part” lines to pick the weight – maybe 8. To do this, the cable wound up on the drum, increasing the diameter, which reduces the crane’s winch capacity. It seems he could pick the girder, swing in place, but when he lowered it, he would not have the power to raise it again. This meant they had one shot at getting it right.
If Higgins, with their team of engineers, couldn’t get it right, I never questioned our decision not to have in-house engineers.