Pile-Driving Gantry System Debuts in North Carolina

摘要

A pair of custom-designed launching gantries has started driving piles, setting precast pier caps and launching and placing precast girders for a new 3-mile-long bridge in North Carolina. The system, created by American, Canadian and Italian firms, will potentially place up to four spans-typically 120 ft long-a month, with minimal wetlands impact. A design-build team led by Flatiron Construction Corp., Longmont, Colo., and United Contractors Inc., Chester, S.C., with Earth Tech, Long Beach, Calif., as engineer of record, holds the $192-million contract to build the Washington Bypass, a six-mile alternative route to Highway 17. With 2.8 miles of bridge over wetlands and river, "we proposed to build it top-down with a truss," says Mark Mallett, Flatiron's project manager. The concept of the pile-driving launching truss came from Elie Homsi, Flatiron's vice president of engineering. The Italian manufacturer Deal and Ontario-based Berminghammer, a division of Bermingham Foundation Solutions, came in to flesh it out. "Can-tilevering forward and driving piles has been done before" in marine projects, notes Patrick Berminghammer, CEO of the Ontario firm. But unlike traditional pile-driving, "this is a semi-automated, high-tech, low-crew operation." Adds his project manager, Stefano Gabaldo, "This is the only machine that can drive piles and create the bridge afterward."