As the big hand on the clock moves past 10, the nightly miracle begins. All the players are in place, each poised like a participant in a carefully orchestrated heist. At the head of the road are two police officers in their cruisers, patiently waiting on the median. Along the left-hand shoulder is a line of white and orange barricades and a team of four workers standing by. The signal is called and each of these men makes his move. The cops switch on their lights and swoop into the roadway, bringing the group of speeding cars to a halt. The four workers grab the barricades and pull them into the road one at a time, delineating a clear line guiding traffic off the highway to the exit for Arthur Kill Road and the turnaround back to the Goethals Bridge.

One of the cops then leads the traffic up the ramp while the other drives across the span, checking it for stragglers. Once it's declared clear, the construction crews crawl onto the bridge like an army of ants sweeping across a picnic blanket, each lugging huge pieces of machinery and parts, setting up camp for the night.

To the average Staten Islander, the closing of the Outerbridge Crossing each night is nothing but a huge inconvenience. They see the orange cones and flashing lights and the next thing they know they're following the orange detour signs to the Goethals Bridge.

And the next day when they drive across the bridge, they rumble across the bumpy surface, milled and exposed with huge steel plates concealing massive gaps in the road. But the work that's being done is nothing short of miraculous -- the tight coordination of construction crews, project supervisors, police personnel and the hundreds of other men and women who came together to make this project happen.

The project is a three-year, $51.2 million deck rehabilitation, intended to extend the life of the 72-year-old concrete bridge deck an extra 10 to 15 years. If everything goes according to plan, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the crossing, will be back in 10 years to replace the deck in its entirety. Until then, what's already there has got to last.

Each night since June the Port Authority shuts down the New Jersey-bound lanes of the bridge. Once the lanes are empty, construction crews filter onto the deck, some of them climbing up from underneath where the contractor has set up a staging area, others driving trucks, cranes and other equipment onto the deck from the start of the bridge on the Staten Island side. The work crews -- some nights totaling as many as 50 people -- instantly take their places. Within 30 minutes of shutting down the road, jackhammers are already pounding away at concrete and steel. The night's work has begun. The work must be completed each night inside a tight time frame of about eight hours. On weekdays, the lanes must be reopened by 6 o'clock the next morning. On weekends, they have a little more time -- they close it down at 11 p.m. but don't have to open it until 8 a.m. on Saturdays and 9 a.m. on Sundays. Still, the time they have on the deck is precious.

While the majority of each shift is spent working on the actual rehabilitation, a large chunk of it is spent taking the roadway apart from the night before and patching it back up to handle traffic the next morning. First they drive the equipment onto the site. Then they pull the heavy steel plates up, most of them covering works in progress -- a steel joint either in the process of being torn up or a new one not yet finished being installed.

A total of about 200 road joints, which allow the bridge to expand and contract depending on the temperature, and hundreds of drainage scuppers will be replaced during the course of the project. The roadway will be completely milled and the nine-inch concrete deck below will be repaired and patched, as well as the parapet walls alongside the roadway. The sidewalk along the main span of the bridge will be replaced and the corroded steel structural beams underneath the deck will be filed down and patched up. As the crews move across the deck, large finished portions are then repaved with a final smooth asphalt riding surface.

While most bridge decks are replaced about every 40 to 50 years, the deck on the Outerbridge today is the same one horses were pulling buggies across when it first opened to traffic in 1928. Back in the mid-1980s, the Port Authority did a major rehabilitation job on the span. And now the work is being called on again to extend the life of the bridge. Sooner or later, though, the deck will have to replaced.

Until recently, the crossing never handled all that much traffic. For the majority of its 72-year history, the bridge was little more than a country span connecting one rural county to another. Today, it's the busiest of the Island's three New Jersey crossings, handling more than 40,000 cars and trucks a day.

A walk across the bridge and a cursory inspection brings to light just how important this project is -- rusted support beams, hollow concrete and corroded road joints imbue the bridge from end to end. With each spike of vibrations from the tractor-trailers rumbling across to Staten Island, the sense of urgency seems clear.

Back on the construction scene, the work is organized in a distinct pattern. About 700 feet of roadway on the Staten Island side is finished -- new road joints have already been installed and the new asphalt riding surface has been laid down. Further along, the road becomes milled and the concrete deck below is revealed. Large square patches of fresh concrete dot the tattered surface. A road joint is in its final stages of being replaced.

On the next section of road a new joint has just been put in the road but the concrete has yet to be poured. And further up the span, another team of workers toils with an opening in the road where a joint has just been taken out and the new one, pre-fabricated, sits along the side of the road. At the next joint even further up the bridge, closing in on the top of the main span where the road hasn't even been milled yet, workers are jackhammering and firing the blow torch at the steel and concrete support around an old, rusted joint that is about to be pulled up. And on the next joint, jackhammers are firing away at the asphalt surrounding the joint -- the first step in the lengthy procedure.

Crews can work on a single joint for days at a time. And when 4 o'clock comes rolling around each morning, they have to begin shutting down, covering their work space with the steel plates and sweeping up the piles of asphalt and crumbled concrete.

The contractor is careful not to get to far ahead of himself -- the work has a natural progression that helps him keep the project organized and makes the bridge suitable to handle traffic each and every morning. On another part of the span, a man sweeps the milled concrete deck with what looks like a broom of metals chains, not pieces of straw. He listens carefully to the sound it makes as it runs across the deck -- hollow sounds mean those are the places where the deck must be ripped up and patched. "It's a very simple, primitive technique, but it works and it's still the best way to find where the concrete needs to be repaired," said Frank Gallo, manager of bridge projects for the Port Authority.

The man takes a can of spray paint and marks a box where he heard the chains call out for help. Later that night or the following day, another team will come by, rip the concrete up and pour a fresh patch. During the night, the bridge transforms into a temporary city -- bustling with activity and energy. But as the shift winds to a close, the machinery is packed up, the holes are covered up, the masons, ironworkers, crane operators, electricians, supervisors and laborers recede over the edges of the bridge, and the next day the driving public has no idea what was going on just hours earlier.

"To me, the scale of the work and the overall scope of what we're trying to accomplish is just amazing," Gallo said. "This may not seem as glamorous as building a monorail at JFK Airport, but it's a complicated, involved project and it's basically invisible to the public. Every night we close the roadway, bring 25 pieces of heavy machinery out here, bring all these workers up here, and then the next morning a person drives back over it like nothing ever happened."

The work is about to end for the season. Come November 15, construction crews will seal the deck up for the winter and put away their cranes, jackhammers, hard hats and concrete trucks.

Then come next spring, the nightly ritual will begin all over again.

CAP: In the early morning hours, a work crew removes old concrete from the roadbed of the Outerbridge Crossing.

Copyright 2001 Staten Island Advance . Copied with permission.

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