Until those 61 beams arrived at the site of the collapse, the repairs couldn’t happen.
More than 80,000 pounds each, those girders were not exactly going to come flying off some assembly line in China in a few hours, but without them, I-85 would remain closed.
It was an emergency rush order that came to Standard Concrete Products in Atlanta the evening of March 30, the dark smoke still rising, the flames still visible, the dark smoke still rising.
The phone call from the Georgia Department of Transportation.
“They called us while the bridge was still on fire,” Mason Lampton, Standard’s chief executive, said as he stood in the rain one morning this week, watching his workers burn through the steel to separate a trio of nearly finished girders.
>> For the full story of how the hard-working, family-owned concrete company saved Atlanta’s commute, click here.
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