NYC's Newest Bridge to Be Hauled Down River Today

A marine transportation crew prepared Monday to haul a prefabricated, 350-foot-long, 2,400-ton bridge from an upstate Hudson River port to New Jersey before its eventual installation over the Harlem River.

The replacement span for the nearly 110-year-old Willis Avenue Bridge linking Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx was moved early Monday morning onto two barges welded side-by-side and docked at the Port of Coeymans, 10 miles south of Albany.

The new swing bridge is scheduled to depart Tuesday morning for Bayonne, N.J., where it's expected to arrive later Wednesday. It will be docked in Bayonne for a couple weeks before being hauled to its permanent site just south of the existing Willis Avenue Bridge.

Installation of the new bridge is scheduled to begin Aug. 2. Removal of the existing span is set for Sept. 20.

The new bridge was built at the three-year-old, privately owned port. The span rested atop a large, box-shaped steel frame while supported at both ends by towers of scaffolding. On Sunday morning, the bridge and the steel frame were placed onto four separate trailers, each 100 feet long. The trailers slowly transported the span about 1,000 feet to the dock. The move, which involved taking a right turn, took about 40 minutes, according to port spokeswoman Karen Moreau.

Getting 4.8 million pounds of steel the final few yards to the barges required four 50-foot-long steel ramps connecting the vessels' decks to the docks. The move was timed to the peak of high tide for this stretch of the Hudson estuary. The 4½-hour process involved precise measuring of the height of the tide and pumping ballast water through the barges to keep them level with the dock, Moreau said.

"They had to measure, pump, roll," she said.

While the bridge was being inched aboard, U.S. Coast Guard and local police patrol boats closed the river to all traffic to prevent wakes that could throw the load off kilter and risk capsizing the barges.

Other river traffic restrictions and closings will be in place as the bridge makes the 130-mile journey to Bayonne, and again in early August when the bridge is hauled the 15 miles north to the Harlem River. The last leg of the journey will be made via the East River because the load's height, 82 feet from the barges' decks to the span's top crossbeam, is too tall for the bridges over the narrow Harlem River.

All the heavy lifting was carried out by a crew from Mammoet, a Dutch company that that specializes in moving extraordinarily large objects. Its past projects include raising the Russian submarine Kursk after it was sunk by an explosion a decade ago, and transporting the 400-foot-long, 5.5-million pound new Providence River Bridge 12 miles up Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay in August 2006.

Barend Schuring, Mammoet's project manager for the bridge job, said each barge is 180 feet long and, when welded together, have a total width of 108 feet.

"They made a big square out of it," Schuring said.

A crew from Weeks Marine Inc. is handling the bridge transportation in a joint venture with the Kiewit Corp., the Omaha, Neb.-based construction company contracted by New York City for the $612 million bridge replacement project.

The new bridge will replace a span that opened in 1901 and carries more than 70,000 vehicles a day. The existing bridge will remain open to traffic as the new span is being floated into place atop foundations and piers.

The project is scheduled for completion in December 2012.

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