Highlights: The Port of Coeymans
“Hwy H2O HIGHLIGHTS†focuses on our member ports and companies throughout the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway System with stories that highlight innovative and interesting cargo movements; changes and improvements that ports and companies are making to create greater opportunity, and/or member insights on the latest market trends.
Highlights: The Port of Coeymans
The 2700-ton Willis Avenue Bridge, assembled at the Port of Coeymans, will replace a structure that is more than a century old over the Harlem River between Manhattan and the Bronx in New York City.
The bridge was rested atop a large, box shaped steel frame while supported at both ends by towers of scaffolding at the port. Upon getting ready for departure, the steel frames were placed onto four separate trailers each 100 feet long, transporting the bridge about 1000 feet to the dock. It was a 41/2 hour process to get the bridge the final few yards to the barge, involving precise measuring of the height of the tide and pumping ballast water through the barges to keep them level with the dock.
The bridge was moved 130 miles to a holding dock in Bayonne, NJ. The river was closed to all traffic by the U.S. Coast Guard and local police patrol boats during that time and again during the second portion (15 miles) of the move, in early August. The trip was quite a spectacle as groups of people stared in awe as the bridge made its way.
The planning of the project began in 1999. Building the bridge off site allowed continued use of the old bridge. The new bridge is 350 feet long, 65 feet high and 77 feet wide.
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