Our good friend Keith Mackenzie of Healy Tibbitts Builders, Inc. reports that Pier 4 is officially in service.
Young Brothers’ Barge Kukahi berthed before first light this morning with a full load of containers that will be unloaded much more efficiently onto the luxuriously-wide new wharf deck.
The Hawaii Harbors Constructors team did great work on this project, and it was a pleasure for us to be involved. Congratulations to the whole project team on a job well done!
A brief post this afternoon because it’s been a long day at Hilo Harbor. One of the most common questions people ask me about wharf construction is “how do you get the piles in the correct locations? It’s a good question, because you can’t really use a tape measure from shore, and the surveyor would have to wear water wings to mark the spot. The solution is a lot more work, but is the only way to accurately place the wharf piles in the correct spot: We build a falsework structure and place a template on it. And by measuring really carefully to be sure that the template is in place, we know that every pile that we drive through the template will be in the correct location too.
This photo has a pretty busy background, which is an unavoidable part of taking action shots of really big equipment in a crowded busy port, but if you look carefully you can see the 999 lowering a 40-ft long template that has positions for driving 20 wharf piles. The surveyor (in a red shirt under his PFD) is walking back to his equipment, which is set up over a very carefully marked spot on the template. If that spot is in the correct location, then the template is correct. And if the template is correct, then we’re ready to drive piles with confidence. All of the rough-looking steel beans and pipe piles are temporary, and are only there to support the all-important template.
So, tomorrow, if all goes well, we start production piledriving that will continue for the next 6 months