The Brunswick News

For the past several months, construction workers building the new Sidney Lanier Bridge have concentrated their efforts inside and at the very tops of the 480-foot-tall towers, underneath the main span, some 200 feet above the Brunswick River, and at various points along the sloping approach ramps.

In other words, they weren't easy to spot, and that gave many the impression that little was happening at the $110-million construction site.

Not so, and the proof has been quite easy to see in recent days.

Like the towers themselves and the main deck they support, the newest work crew on the job can be seen for miles around as they scale the heights of the bridge's cable stay system.

Workers in bright orange man-lifts are slowly working their way along the entire length of each of the bridge's 176 cable stays in preparation for checking another monumental task off their ever-shortening work list: the grouting of the stays.

"Each stay cable is encased in a heavy plastic pipe and to prevent corrosion from getting the stay cables, we inject a cement grout into the pipe and that provides long-term protection for the stay cables," said Brian West, project manager for construction contractor Recchi-GLF.

West said it will take about 90 days to grout all of the stays, which measure up to 750 feet in length from the deck to their anchorage points on the two main towers.

"The stays are grouted end-to-end," West said. "The overall job is about a three-month operation. They started in early July. It's a huge amount of work. It's very difficult. They've been working six days a week, sometimes around the clock."

In about 10 days or so, another crew will begin wrapping the grouted stays in vinyl tape to protect the outer plastic covering from sun damage. The tape will make a dramatic difference in the appearance of the bridge's superstructure.

"White zones will begin creeping up the pipes in the next few weeks," West said.

Taping of the stays will finish up within a week or two of the grouting job.

"It's going to take a while," West said. "We don't have a real good production rate fixed for that yet."

Some sections of the stays will have to be hand-wrapped, but "99.9 percent" of the tape will be applied mechanically, West said.

"The tape goes into a special machine that goes in a circular fashion around the stay pipe and it lays the tape down at a certain rate and at a certain angle so that the correct coverage is achieved," he said.

Aside from regular inspections of the stays, particularly at the points where they are anchored in the main towers of the bridge, the cables shouldn't require maintenance for several years.

"I can't imagine there being any service required probably for 10 to 20 years, but ... that's pretty speculative," West said.

Recchi-GLF is currently working with the Georgia Department of Transportation to reschedule the completion date for the new bridge, and West deferred questions about the completion deadline to the DOT.

The department's district office in Jesup did not respond immediately to a request for that information.

Two weeks ago, the opening date was pushed back from Halloween to a date somewhere between Nov. 15 and 22.