What Brenda Left Behind

We moved to Maine last year for family reasons, and at the time it was very hard for Brenda to leave the job she loved with General Construction, a Seattle-area marine contractor. Right now GC is completing the final step in a huge project, one that Brenda was helping to plan before she left, and would surely be working on if she was still in Seattle. They are finishing up the replacement of the eastern half of the Hood Canal Bridge.

The orange, white, and black cranes in the photo belong to GC, and the green and white tugboat is from Foss. Puget Sound natives will probably recall that the western half of this floating bridge sank in a storm in 1979 and was replaced, while the eastern half had survived, damaged, until about a month ago. That was when GC moved in, unhooked the submarine cables, yanked it out, then anchored up the replacement pontoons, which have taken the past three years to build.

Another part of the shutdown was to replace the two trusses at each end of the bridge. To accomplish this, GC brought up the "General", from its home port in California. It is a 700-ton capacity crane on a 100' x 300' barge, and is the largest floating crane on the west coast.

  

The photos below show one old truss coming out (also notice the navy submarine in the background)........and one new truss going in.Right now the team is on schedule to open the bridge to traffic about a week early, and has completed a huge amount of work in a very short time without any accidents or injuries to the crews.Brenda would like to give a big shout-out to her old friends at GC, and say congratulations for the great job they did at Hood Canal!