| It may be made of concrete and steel, but to the people who rely upon it for a wage it is a living, breathing entity. Larry Schwartz reports on the secret life of the West Gate Bridge. WHEN you flick off the torch, the darkness of the cavern is punctured by light from small holes in the concrete that project on to the walls tiny images of vehicles flickering along West Gate Bridge. “I have spent days in here,” says bridge inspector, Peter Symons, 30, who had unbolted a manhole, pocketing the padlock so we are not trapped here within a concrete viaduct on the western side of the bridge. A welder/boilermaker by trade, he has the loneliest of jobs – walking, climbing, burrowing to check for corrosion or other flaws. “You’ve got to be part ferret to do this job.” Down a metal ladder in the concrete and into the hollow tunnel – one of the spans between columns that 24 years ago collapsed during construction, killing 35 men. Flick the torch on again and you see icicle-like stalactites above you where water has seeped through bolts, drawing the salt in the concrete. “It’s good,” he says. “I’m the sort of bloke who doesn’t want to be tied down with other people.” A hundred thousand cars pass overhead each day. But you can barely hear the traffic from here. Just the squeak of electrical pipes vibrating against the walls as the columns sway on bearings at their base. With notebook, pen, torch, camera and sometimes special optical viewing instruments, Symons’ workplace is the 2582-metre West Gate Bridge, Australia’s second-longest after the Houghton Highway, Bramble Bay, in Queensland. The project extends from Graham Street, Port Melbourne, in the east, to Williamstown Road, in the west. The bridge features concrete viaducts to the east and west and the main steel bridge across the Yarra. A link with Melbourne’s west that has been a boon to local industry, trucks account for 12 per cent of traffic. Others include city workers who would otherwise have considerable delays via Footscray or Dynon roads. For some the bridge is little more than a convenience that speeds up travel time in and out of the city. Others talk with a fondness that makes it seem alive. “You take it as a static object but it’s living, moving …” says bridge maintenance engineer Peter Carter, “… and it will talk to you in a deep rumbling way.” So functional is the bridge, we forget how recent an addition it is to our cityscape. It is just 30 years since an organisation called the Western Industries Association asked the State Government to appoint a committee to report on the advisability of constructing a bridge or a tunnel here. In November, it will be 16 years since the bridge three kilometres above the Yarra estuary was officially opened. It made its presence felt in the most tragic of circumstances – the horror of the collapse that a royal commission report in August 1971 attributed not just to inadequacies in design but the actions of the people involved, designers, contractors and labor. Away from the heart of the city, it will probably never become quite as emblematic as the Sydney Harbor Bridge, less than half its size. Peter Carter, however, says that with the view from Punt Road along the river to the city, West Gate Bridge is one of two “classic pictures” of Melbourne. Fred Maddern, executive director of the Western Region Commission, talks of it in the same breath as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Though he insists that it has become “one of Melbourne’s icons”, Maddern does not share the sense of significance attributed to the bridge by the likes of Peter Frohnert, 53, franchisee of the Shell service stations at the former toll collection points at the city side of the bridge. “The bridge is like the Berlin Wall,” says Frohnert with a flourish. “This divides the west from the east.” From his vantage point, he sees it spanning not just regional but vast socio-economic, even cultural, differences. As a boy growing up in Glenroy, he would accompany his father on business trips across the Yarra. His dad was a smallgoods distributor, who would take the ferry that once linked Williamstown and Port Melbourne to deliver his wares to delicatessens. He claims his service station on the south side of the approach to the bridge does two-thirds of their total business and is the busiest in Australia. Thousands stop off each day. In the early hours of a Sunday, you’ll find weekend surfers meeting here, checking fuel, tyres, water, pie, drink, chocolate. Aviation- style wind socks on the structure enables them to decide the destination. If it’s a north-easterly, they’ll head for Point Lonsdale or Queenscliff; a north-westerly and they’ll continue further down to Bells Beach and beyond. Some come “for a kick”, says Frohnert, a chocolate bar, or bottle or cola, on their way home to the west from work in the city. Truck drivers stop off for a break. Frohnert says drug deals routinely occur in the parking area. “Every unsavory character in Melbourne stops here to do a deal and then way they go.” Rees Lewis, 23, is assistant restaurant manager at the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet alongside the westbound service station. It is open day and night. People come for burgers, chips and nugget wedges – foods you can eat while you drive. About 3 am, the nightclub crowd comes along for snacks. There are a lot of drunk people among the patrons, Lewis says. The catering order calls from factories come between 2am and 5am. Lewis grew up in Yarraville. Ironically, the bridge might force him out of the neighborhood. He has been watching the property market and says the increased attractiveness to young professionals from the eastern suburbs in particular has forced house prices up at least 20 per cent in recent years. At the nearby nine-hole West Gate Bridge golf club, you play the first hole south of the bridge, use a pedestrian roadway to the second to eighth on the north side, then return to the south to tee off for the ninth. Before the bridge, it was known as Spotswood Golf Club and was to the south of Stony Creek. As compensation for land taken for the bridge, Footscray Council gave it an area of land to the north. A former plasterer and monumental mason who was at work at Footscray cemetery when the bridge collapsed, 66-year-old vice-president Bob Major says he was course superintendent in charge of maintaining the ground in the 1980s. Still a regular, he says he is “just an average weekend golfer”, with a 24 handicap. Among the best views of the bridge at close range is from Memorial Park, off Douglas Road, Spotswood, where a large brass plaque on marble commemorates “our comrades who lost their lives” as well as “workers of all lands who are killed in industrial accidents”. From here, you begin to understand the claims by some that for all its early failings, the bridge has aesthetic appeal. “It’s living,” engineer Peter Carter says as we stand here beneath the bridge. “It is serene too.” Few would have as intimate a knowledge of the bridge as Carter or Symons. From the 500,000 bolts that hold it in place, to the dark, invisible “black ice”, a phenomenon common in the European cold that used to form on the western deck causing vehicles to skid until increased traffic after the removal of the tolls in 1985, warmed the surface preventing the phenomenon. There are well-known but rarely spoken secrets. A Footscray-based newspaper, The Western Mail, earlier this year broke a taboo when it published a front-page story on a 28-year-old Laverton man who had survived a 60-metre jump from the bridge. A spokesman for Vic Roads, which administers the bridge, says it has an agreement with police not to discuss suicide from the bridge for fear of encouraging the phenomenon. Some say the October 1970 collapse embedded the bridge in our psyche to such an extent that most people can tell you where they were and what they were doing that day. They liken it to the death of J.F. Kennedy to Americans. Predictably, it would become a focus for dark humor. The stigma remains. “I was sitting on my backdoor step playing with my small daughter and heard this dreadful crash,” says longtime Williamstown resident, Lorraine West. “It was eerie. It was like a giant explosion …” The tragedy has colored her view of the bridge since. “It’s something that you never forget. I know people who are scared to drive across the bridge. I am too on a high-wind day.” You get some idea of the hell of the moment the span collapsed at 11.50am on 15 October 1970 when you clamber on to a flimsy cage-like two-level metal gantry, one of three suspended off the side of the bridge for maintenance work. They hove along a monorail. “You’ve got to remember that this thing is suspended by two shackles and a couple of safety chains,” is Peter Symons’s chilling reassurance as we gaze upon the spot where the collapse occurred. “That’s the only thing that’s holding us.” He tells of firemen and police officers here on exercises too afraid to let go of the bridge. Nor will he remain in the gantry when the wind blows too fiercely. Traffic conditions are monitored with video cameras linked to VicRoads’ traffic control and communication centre in Prospect Hill Road, Camberwell. Patrols are able to respond to incidents 24 hours a day. Scenes around the bridge appear on 10 television screens in the building’s control room. Greg Wylie, 41, in charge part of the time, can quickly alert his incident management team when there has been an emergency. They attend about 50 incidents a week and there may be as many as five accidents in a morning. On one of the screens, he shows how an amber light flashing on signs on the bridge when the winds reach 50 kilometres per hour automatically prompts the light on a speed limit to drop from the usual 80 kilometres per hour to 60 kilometres per hour. It drops to 40 kilometres per hour if the light turns red when the wind blows at more than 65 kilometres per hour. The longest-serving maintenance worker here, Jim Fanklin, is mowing the lawn outside. In a truck with two others, he patrols the bridge and patches roads where necessary with hot or cold (for temporary work) mixes of asphalt. They might check for debris, fix guard rails, poles or signs that have been knocked over or help with lane closures. Councils, police and emergency services have a detailed diversion plan which they can use in emergencies, such as the Coode Island chemical fire. There is a computerised sign west of the bridge on the Princes Highway to alert motorists when to use alternative routes. Now 53, Mr Fanklin joined the bridge authority as a gardener 23 years ago, the year after the collapse. When the bridge came down, he was working for a contractor who was planting 80,000 trees and shrubs in the area. He was at one of the oil refineries when it occurred. Finally, we squeeze into the entrance of the west cable tower (a visiting engineer once got stuck inside and had to be dragged out feet first) and climb 48 metres up metal rungs, closing grid-like trapdoor gates behind us, installed at intervals to ensure you can only fall part of the way down. In the bright light outside again, we have reached a point from which abseilers are engaged to change the fluorescent lights. Below, an orange chemical tanker and tug make their way up and under the bridge. You can see Newport Power Station, Coode Island, the Mobil and BP storage centres. Further out, you can see the police academy in Mount Waverley, in the distance the Dandenong Ranges, or the You Yangs. Or look down at some of the 100,000 vehicles a day on four lanes (plus breakdown lanes) each way, now able to make a quick journey where there was once a steam-driven chain ferry carrying up to 32 cars at a time. THE SUNDAY AGE, 11-Sep-1994 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 