On a clear, bright, tourist-ready day but with a mid-winter wind humming through the nearby cables, the muscular guy in the neon orange traffic vest swings out on a web of steel rigging to reach a latticework of I-beams and under-girders. The roar of traffic drowns out anything he might say, but his communication is intimate anyway: with the steel, with the structure, with the coating. He reaches a brush into a three-gallon container of orange paint-international orange paint, to be specific, and in this application it's a very specific color, as millions of tourist photos testify-and dabs some on to the iron. "The most difficult part is the approaches," says Dennis Dellaroca, "because they don't have any access like the suspension part does. Any parts of the bridge that are over land have to be rigged completely to do any kind of work on them." His colleague, Noel Stampfli, nods in agreement. "The most difficult part of painting the bridge is not putting paint on steel. It's getting to the steel that you need to paint that's difficult, and there are some incredible challenges in getting into some of these areas."
展开▼
