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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Monday, November 07, 2011 at 12:36:08 :
In Reply to: Re: Mechanical Engineers Question posted by Doc Dave [69.19.14.17] on Monday, November 07, 2011 at 12:10:19 :
They would if I was the mayor. The streets they use are actually still designated a state highway (old US 10, last stoplight on I-90)and the state maintains it, but most of the time the megaload guys run over the curbs and/or bang the light poles trying to negotiate the corners. Plus there's all the time for cops who have to redirect traffic, get people to move their cars, and one time I remember call out the county sand truck just so they could get a little steerage on the ice. I'd send them a bill for every bit of that, and I'm sure they'd pay it without batting an eye. When you've got maybe a dozen men and half a dozen support vehicles plus two of the most souped-up geared-down tractor-trailer rigs you ever saw, for a week-long trip with motels for everybody every night, a bill for 10 grand or so from some podunk town along the way for street damage and cop overtime is chump change.
One megaload was a single, simple, electric winch -- just a big motor and a drum -- made in the USA, heading for some oil field in China. With the drum empty it was over 500,000 lbs net. Another was the center section for the new Tacoma Narrows bridge. It made it all the way from the midwest to the Washington state line, whereupon it got dead-lined at the Stateline scale house. It was rather ironic that this bridge section, ordered by the WSDOT was too heavy to legally move on Washington state highways as per WSDOT regulations. You'd think somebody would have checked. What they should have done was take it down to Lewiston, put it on a barge, and barged it right to the Tacoma Narrows, since they had to put it on a barge in Tacoma anyway, but instead they wrote an exception to the regs, put more axles under the thing, closed all westbound lands of I-90 while moving it, and created a website so drivers could see where it was at all times and avoid trying to go anywhere while it was on the move. So the thing is too heavy for I-90 in Washington state, but it's okay to haul it through the 120 year old downtown streets of Wallace. I think that's the one that cracked the curb and sidewalk in front of my building.
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