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Another sign that the Downtown Span of the Ohio River Bridges Project is progressing is the delivery of the first structural steel beams to the project. The first loads of the structural steel beams for the Downtown Span arrived at the Port of Indiana a couple of weeks ago. These massive steel beams were unloaded there and will soon be used to build sub assemblies for the Downtown Span. They will be assembled on barges in the Ohio River and then towed down river to the job site where they will be lifted into place to begin building the actual bridge itself. I rode up there to shoot the unloading of them and to see first hand how massive they are.
The Walsh Construction job site is in the Port of Indiana which is located on the Ohio River near the eastern end of Six Mile Island. The first photo in this post shows a few of the structural steel beams sitting on trailers at the Port of Indiana. In the background the boom of the crane that will unload them rises into the morning sky.
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The massive size of these structural steel beams can be seen in the image above. The Ironworkers standing on the beam are around six feet tall and they seem tiny when contrasted with the beam itself. In this shot they are preparing to rig the structural steel beam for the pick.The lifting of material or equipment by a crane is known as a “pick”. Rigging a pick is critical work that requires attention to safety and detail as any mistake made then can have catastrophic results once the load is in the air. The yellow structures behind the Ironworkers are safety devices that will catch the worker if he should slip and fall.
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In the photo above you can better see the massive hook that is clamped onto the flange of the beam for the pick. The body of the device rests on the beam and two massive jaws are then lowered and secured to the flange.
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Hand signals are one of the main ways that Ironworkers communicate with the crane Operator. In this image he is directing the crane Operator to move the lifting hook to the proper location for clamping it to the beam.
All of the images in this post are three frame brackets sets of +2, 0 and -2 EV exposures that have been merged in NIK HDR Efex Pro 2 to create HDR images. I used the Balanced preset and then adjusted the Detail slider to Accentuated and the Drama slider to Deep before returning the merged file to Aperture 3 for final adjustments of the shadows, highlights, contrast, detail, color channels and sharpening.