Tower Tour 

July 25, 2002

Before we started the tour, we each had to put on a safety harness. This is  a requirement for all people who are going to the top of the bridge.  The big hooks that you can see here are used by the workers to attach themselves to secure parts of the bridge for their safety.

We are in one of the anchorages. The small cables which make up the large suspension cable will be attached to the steel rods embedded in the concrete. After the bridge is done, a concrete slab will cover the top.

This is a cable guide, not to be confused with the movie, Buy cheap levitra online - levitra online. The Cable Guy. J The cable guide will be used to guide the cables over the saddles that will be placed on top of the towers. The saddles are right...

...Here. These are specially designed for placing cables on the top of suspension bridges and holding them. These pieces had just arrived from Norway where they were made.

Here is an inside view of the saddle showing the things that will hold the cables in place on top of the towers. 

After we crossed the trestle bridge to get to the "Man Hauler", or the elevator, ( they didn't have a woman-hauler ), we went to the top to take pictures and hang out. This is a picture of the anchorages from the top of the tower. You can see the footbridges on the sides connected to each one.

We admired the amazing view we had of Vallejo in this picture. We also went to the other side of the tower to get a view of Crockett. The island in the background is called Mare Island which was active in WW II for shipbuilding. Mrs. Allison was a bit scared of the height of the tower, but we weren't 'cause we were brave. 

This is the trestle bridge we walked across to get to the Man Hauler. It looks so small from up there. Bart reminded us that the trestle bridge was built to protect the breeding ground of the salmon and the other endangered species.

Here's a picture of a worker on one of the footbridges. The footbridge was built over a period of 2 weeks. We wanted to go across one of them but they were restricted from the non-workers and they were too dangerous.

The workers that work at the highest point of the bridge are the crane workers. We watched the crane lift one of the cable guides off of the top of the tower.

Here are two laborers working on top of the tower. One's a woman. Kayla and LaNaudia expected to see only men working on the bridge. Breyana expected to see a mixture of gender and ethnicities.

This is the view of all three bridges that we saw from the top of the tower. Pretty soon the middle bridge will be demolished.

When we came down from the tower we all had a feeling that we were part of the crew. We thought our visit was too short and we wanted to go back up.