The Gay Head Light relocation project continues, with a foundation of concrete blocks slowly rising around a gridwork of steel beams that supports the 400-ton structure and about half the excavated material being returned to the site.
On May 30, the brick-and-masonry tower came to rest about six feet above a large concrete pad farther inland from the eroding Gay Head cliffs. Some of the steel beams have been removed, and the lighthouse now rests at its final elevation, with the beacon maintaining its height of 170 feet above sea level.
With the 129-foot move complete, workers are now focused on the less dramatic but equally important work of creating a permanent foundation for the lighthouse and restoring the site.
“It has been a relatively quiet week,” project manager Richard Pomroy said Friday. About a quarter of the new foundation, which will extend slightly beyond the original lighthouse footprint, has been completed.
The concrete blocks will fill the spaces between the beams, which rest on a series of hydraulic jacks. Eventually the jacks will be lowered and the beams will be removed. The remaining spaces will then be filled with more blocks and mortar.
By Wednesday, a large metal column linking the pad to the original support pole inside the lighthouse was in place. Workers planned to further secure it to the concrete pad with grouting.
The lighthouse has held up well during the relocation. “Not one even hairline crack in this thing,” said Joe Scarfone, a project manager for International Chimney Corporation, which engineered the move and is doing the foundation work. He added that the new foundation would bear the load of the lighthouse more evenly than the steel beams. “So we’ll be fine, come time to lower it,” he said.
Expert House Movers, which conducted the move itself, is expected to return this month to remove the beams.
Other progress is also continuing at the site. The mountains of soil and clay that have occupied the town parking lot at Aquinnah Circle this spring have begun to disappear as John Keene Excavation of West Tisbury restores the excavated material.
On Wednesday, about 300 cubic yards of clay had been returned to the ground, and a 10-ton vibratory roller rumbled back and forth across the area where the lighthouse once stood. The goal is to recreate the same layers and compaction levels as before, in order to bolster the cliff and prevent uneven erosion.
“When they work clay too much it becomes liquified and it almost becomes unstable,” Mr. Pomroy said. “So the trick is to not overwork it.” The densely packed clay sprang up slightly from under the wheels of the passing roller.
Geotechnical engineer Steve Dube took measurements using a nuclear densometer, a yellow box about the size of a briefcase. The instrument detects the amount of radiation returning from the end of a metal rod that is plunged into the ground. He said the compaction in that layer would be about 90 per cent restored.
By Friday, all of the soil and clay from the western part of the site — about 2,000 cubic yards — had been returned to the ground. Once the new foundation is complete and the beams are removed, the rest of the site will be restored, leaving about 10 inches of the original granite foundation of the lighthouse exposed.
Landscope Inc. of Edgartown was expected to begin returning salvaged vegetation to the site on Monday.
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