The ‘Left Coast Lifter’ has set off from Oakland Harbor, near San Francisco, to travel to the east coast of the USA where it will work on the replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge. The floating crane had previously been used on the construction of the new east span of the San Francisco—Oakland Bay Bridge.
It has a boom length of 100m and has a lifting capacity of more than 1,607t. A crew of mariners will guide the 122m-long crane along the West Coast, through the Panama Canal and the Gulf of Mexico, and then up the East Coast before arriving in the Hudson River. The trip is more than 9,500km long and will take between six and eight weeks to complete.
The bridge is being designed and built by Tappan Zee Constructors, a consortium that includes Fluor, American Bridge, Granite and Traylor Bros along with design firms HDR, Buckland & Taylor, URS and GZA.
