The road closes at night, and nobody driving past would guess why.<\/p>\n
A line of flashing cruisers blocks both lanes.<\/p>\n
Somewhere ahead, a flatbed inches forward at a walking pace.<\/p>\n
Underneath it, where the pavement should be, sits a makeshift floor of steel beams.<\/p>\n
It gets laid down, driven over, and taken up again before sunrise.<\/p>\n
So what exactly is being covered over on that bridge deck for a few hours each night?<\/p>\n
The trick is simple once you see it: a standard highway bridge is rated for the steady stream of ordinary trucks and cars, not for one object weighing more than 683,000 pounds<\/strong> stretched across its span at once. Spreading that weight out<\/strong> is the whole job.<\/p>\n Crews lay a temporary framework of heavy steel beams over the existing bridge, creating a wider footprint for the load to roll across. Maine agencies and local police have a name for the setup: a jumper bridge<\/strong>, essentially steel beams put across a bridge to spread out the weight of the load. The point is that no single section of the structure underneath takes the whole thing alone.<\/p>\n Once the beams are set and the detours go up, the convoy edges across at a crawl, surrounded by state troopers and utility crews<\/strong> whose job includes lifting low hanging lines out of the way. Then, almost as soon as the load clears the far side, the beams come back up.<\/p>\n It is a borrowed bridge<\/strong>, built for one crossing and gone before the morning commute. That is part of why most drivers who hit the detour have no idea what rolled through their town overnight.<\/p>\n The object behind all this was a heat recovery steam generator, the kind used at factories and power plants to recycle exhaust. It began its trip at the former Androscoggin Mill<\/strong> in Jay, a paper town in the state’s interior. Its destination was Turner Island<\/a> in South Portland, the site of a shipping company and gas terminal on the coast.<\/p>\n On paper the numbers alone explain the spectacle. State police listed the load at 20 feet wide, more than 19 feet tall and 219 feet long<\/strong>, weighing more than 683,000 pounds. That is nearly three quarters the distance between the goal lines of a football field, and more than eight multi axle trucks<\/strong> loaded to the federal 80,000 pound limit, moving down narrow country roads built for pickup trucks and school buses.<\/p>\n The route was announced as passing through communities in four counties: Franklin, Androscoggin, Oxford and Cumberland. By the time the convoy finished, local coverage counted portions of five counties<\/strong>, with York County added after an overnight hold in Buxton.<\/p>\n What was billed as quick turned into something closer to an expedition. The generator left Jay on a Tuesday evening on what was planned as a two night run<\/strong>, originally due in South Portland by 6 a.m. Thursday.<\/p>\n Instead it arrived nearly a week behind that schedule. Progress was slow in the most literal sense, with the load expected to travel under five miles an hour<\/strong>. At that pace a single overnight leg between towns could eat an entire shift.<\/p>\n State police said the first setback came when the convoy did not reach the jumper bridge in Turner in time. From there it held in Turner, then Oxford, then sat staged in Gray from Friday through Sunday before moving to Buxton for the final push to the coast. One operation on Route 117 in Turner required bridge setup activities<\/strong> beginning around 6:30 p.m., closing the road between East Hebron Road and Weston Road to all traffic well before the load itself arrived.<\/p>\n The last major obstacle sat almost within sight of the destination. The convoy crossed a Maine Turnpike bridge<\/a> early one Tuesday morning, a few hours after crews set up a jumper bridge to spread the weight across that final span.<\/p>\n From there the route narrowed into city streets, running along U.S. Route 1 in Scarborough to Broadway and Elm Street in South Portland. At 8 a.m. that Tuesday, a state transportation department spokesperson confirmed the load had reached Turner Island<\/strong>, its final destination in Maine.<\/p>\n From the coast, the plan was to put the generator on a cargo vessel<\/a> and ship it south, the next leg of a journey that had already crossed an entire state on temporary steel<\/strong>.<\/p>\n What makes the story stick is how ordinary the ingredients were. A crew’s steel beams, a handful of state troopers, utility trucks and a machine nobody outside the paper industry would recognize shut down rural intersections for a week. It is the same basic principle used when a towboat<\/a> works its way around an obstacle it cannot simply push through, translated from water onto asphalt.<\/p>\n This was also only the opening act. Officials said it was the first of nine oversize loads<\/strong> planned along the route. The remaining eight were to carry two more heat recovery<\/strong> steam generators, three gas turbines and three gas turbine driven electric generators, part of a dozen pieces of mill equipment the site’s owner sold to a packaging company.<\/p>\n The same jumper bridges, the same overnight closures and the same slow crawl were set to repeat through the same small towns, one borrowed bridge at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The road closes at night, and nobody driving past would guess why. A line of flashing cruisers blocks both lanes. Somewhere ahead, a flatbed inches forward at a walking pace. Underneath it, where the pavement should be, sits a makeshift floor of steel beams. It gets laid down, driven over, and taken up again before … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":43801,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"mill generator weighing","rank_math_title":"A mill generator weighing more than 683,000 pounds crawled across Maine from Jay to the coast over a week of overnight moves, crossing bridges only after crews laid temporary steel beams across them","rank_math_description":"A Maine convoy hauling a 684,000 pound generator needed temporary steel jumper bridges to cross 3 spans built decades ago.","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43802,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43796\/revisions\/43802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What was actually riding on those beams<\/h2>\n
Why a two day trip turned into a week<\/h2>\n
The Maine Turnpike crossing that closed the final gap<\/h2>\n
Why this crawl across Maine is only the beginning<\/h2>\n