Sticks, State Troopers, and Speed

Union Concrete wins a bet on bridge speed while federal agents panic over rogue popsicle sticks after a thruway wreck.

The early 70’s brought the start of many years of thruway bridge rehabs.

I-90 over Tonawanda Creek in Penbroke was the first. This job had traffic shifted with crossovers delineated with wood barriers. These consisted of 16’ long 12”x12” timbers with three runs of black and white striped 2 x 6’ attached to 4”x4” uprights. Back then it was quite common to get a call to go cleanup a wreck. Cars could do some damage, but sleeping truck drivers really tore things up. One such wreck was a tandem tractor trailer that not only took out the crossover section but then careened over and took out the direction dividers. This effectively closed down I-90 in both directions. To say it was a mad scramble to get the road open was an understatement. In the middle of all the chaos, the federal food and drug administration showed up and found the one trailer had a half dozen pallets of popsicle sticks strewn all over and issued a stop work order to control the disposal of said sticks, so they didn’t make it to the private market.

It was interesting to watch feds and state troopers at odds over something as trivial as popsicle sticks. Within a matter of minutes, the feds left under the watchful eyes of the trooper and we went back to work.

In the discussion of Henry Street, I talked of the methods of deck removal with 90 pound busters. I am happy to say that Henry was the last time Union Concrete removed a deck in that fashion.

Ingersoll-Rand developed the “ARM 1000.” An excavator mounted, air driven hammer. George found out and grabbed the first two out of the factory. As I said, they were air driven, so they needed a 600 CFM compressor with 2” bull hose connected the two. The “excavators” were old public works Gradalls so one could twist the boom to put the hammer at an angle. Wide bridges were fine, but two lane decks could get pretty congested with two Gradalls, two 600 compressors and a truck crane to pick the slabs.

The top bridge on exit 50 started on Monday morning, and Friday night we had two thruway officials come out from Albany to enjoy the celebrations and pay George on the bet that we could not get it done in one week.
We were the bridge guys of Western New York.