In 2013/2014, I worked on the Curtis Coleman Memorial Bridge located in Alexandria, Louisiana. The company i worked for did all the underwater work associated with the project.
Constructing a pier
When looking at a bridge pier, its easy to assume the huge pier was somehow just placed there. In reality, there is lots of work that goes into constructing that pier, sometimes spanning many years of work!
The plans for this pier required 5ft diameter, 120ft deep footings (deep, re-bar filled concrete pillars below the surface).
Drilling the holes, fabricating then setting the re-bar, then pouring the concrete takes lots of time. If I remember correctly, the concrete pour took a week, with non-stop trucks delivering concrete 24hrs a day.
Jump into the work
To get to the office, located at the bottom of the river, we could either use a crane to lower us in a basket to the surface of the water, or we could jump from the decking.
The decking was about 20ft above the water, so the jump was super fun!
Jumping was much faster and, lets be honest, much more fun.
