VIDEOS: Broadway Bridge arch in position; crews now working on alignment

One of the two new Broadway Bridge arches was floated into place Tuesday.
One of the two new Broadway Bridge arches was floated into place Tuesday.

3:05 P.M. UPDATE:

A construction crew will spend the next several hours aligning and lowering the new Broadway Bridge arch into place after it floated to its new position Tuesday afternoon, a highway department spokesman said.

Danny Straessle with the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department said the crew from Massman Construction Co. is working to secure the arch into place after it was moved into position around 1:30 p.m., about an hour after it began floating toward its objective.

Workers are now in the process of aligning the arch with the piers that will support the bridge over the water. Water will flood into the barges in intervals, sinking them slightly while lowering the arch onto the pier caps, Straessle said.

Straessle said the margin for error is slim, and the workers will have to be careful when accounting for the arch’s horizontal and vertical movement as it’s lowered.

The arch was originally supposed to move into place at 8 a.m., but safety meetings with the construction crew and tugboat captains took longer than expected. The crew’s objective was to have the arch moved before sunset, and it can employ floodlights if work continues into the night.

Read Wednesday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

— Austin Cannon

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A construction company worked Tuesday to float the first arch of the new Broadway Bridge toward its permanent position.

This initial phase of implementing the new span, which was set to begin at 8 a.m., got a later start because of prolonged safety meetings with crew-members and the tugboat captain, said Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department spokesman Danny Straessle.

[WATCH LIVE: Watch the span moved into position as it happens]

The arch began moving about 12:30 p.m.

The goal is to have what will be the bridge's north arch in its approximate new location before the sun goes down, at which point workers from Massman Construction Co. will “delicately jack it into place,” Straessle said.

The steel arch is propped up on yellow falsework towers, which stand atop floating barges parked at the north shore of the river, said a state highway official. Cranes, using winches attached to the structure, will pull it through the waterway to rest between two existing cement piers jutting out of the river.

The margin for error is slim — there's only a half inch of tolerable wiggle room on either side of the the more-than 4 million pound arch, the official said. Once in place, water is pumped inside the barges to sink them slightly, and the span is welded to existing bearings and bolted to concrete.

Jeff Sears, a pedestrian on the Main Street Bridge, said he's been watching the progress from his nearby home in Argenta and was impressed with how tough a fight the original Broadway Bridge put up by refusing to collapse on time last month. It took nearly five hours from when explosives were detonated to when the steel archway actually fell into the water.

Still, it was time for the old to be swapped out for the new, Sears said. He took up rowing in July and often floated underneath the span as he traversed the river with his teammates. And when they would look up, Sears said, they'd see chunks of missing pieces pockmarking the bottom of the bridge.

Read Wednesday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

— Emma Petit

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