Murray Johnson had performed this sort of heavy lifting before, but the previous feat was just a warm-up. This time, the executive engineer for North Vancouver, British Columbia-based Buckland & Taylor Ltd. is shooting for a world record. He and his colleagues believe that the Milton-Madison Bridge, now being built over the Ohio River between Kentucky and Indiana, would involve the biggest truss slide in history.
"We have specialized over the years in many crazy—I mean high-end—erection schemes. From that point of view, we have confidence," says Johnson. As he and I talked over the phone in early July, Johnson was being careful not to overstate the riskiness of sliding an approximately 2,400-ft-long truss. But after some gentle nudging, he soon admitted that the job was "definitely interesting and exciting and a little bit scary when push comes to shove and you actually lift this over the river."