Father and Son Team Drive 80-foot Pilings to Build New Bridge

David Spears sat in the crane’s cockpit and lowered the 46,000-pound counterweight onto the tractor trailer.

Jesus was with him.

After he’d nestled the load onto the truck, Spears tugged at the left sleeve of his neon-yellow T-shirt — a tattoo of Christ peeked out at the workers securing the weight on the trailer.

The men worked efficiently, grease-stained and dirt-covered hands throwing heavy chain across the counterweight as the truck idled in the parking lot of the Kangaroo Express gas station off Fording Island Road.

His work done, Spears climbed down from the cockpit. A silver, braided ponytail snaked out the back of his hardhat, and when he turned around, sunglasses rested over a white handlebar mustache.

He rolled up his sleeves.

“Anything to get a little wind, man,” he said, referring to the cockpit’s glass canopy, which was propped open atop the crane. “That thing’s like a magnifying glass.”

Spears, 56, of Augusta, Ga., has been operating cranes for 37 years. For the past eight months, he’s worked for R.R. Dawson Bridge Co. on the Bluffton Parkway Flyover in South Carolina. The $45-million project is scheduled to open Friday, Beaufort County Engineering Director Rob McFee said Wednesday afternoon. The first cars will be allowed onto the bridge during “a non-peak traffic time,” McFee said.

When those first cars on the flyover near the on-ramp that merges onto U.S. 278 toward Hilton Head Island, they’ll be driving over pilings Spears placed with a crane. Hammering a 55,000-pound piling into the ground is a dangerous job. It requires precision and care. Especially in Spears’ case — his son, Donnie, is down below, in the shadow of the 80-foot concrete beams that dangle from his machine.