DAVENPORT, Iowa — As crews continue to take the westbound span of the old I-74 Bridge apart, all the pieces of metal are being sent out to be recycled.
Millions and millions of pounds of rebar, steel beams and suspension cables have arrived at Del's Metal Co. and Midwest Recyclers.
"Pretty much anything that you have seen or drove over that was metal has came to our yards," said Christina Caldwell, vice president of Del's and president of Midwest Recyclers.
At the end of April, officials working on deconstructing the old bridge announced that more than five million pounds of steel had been removed, and that was two months before the implosion of the eastbound span.
Getting the contract to recycle the old bridge was a goal for Caldwell as soon as she heard the plan to demolish it. She called watching the old bridge come down a "once in a lifetime opportunity."
"It was one of my goals that I was going to figure out how to keep all the steel coming off of it locally here in our community," she said. "I just started reaching out to all the contractors that were down there working and was able to lock in getting every piece of metal that there was."
Before Helm Group started taking apart the decking on the bridge, Caldwell and her family, who help run the recycling yards, got to tour the old bridge to get an idea of what material they'd be receiving and taking apart.
The scrap yards at the two companies are a sea of pieces of those signature green towers. Each piece gets cut down to different size specifications from four-foot to two-foot or 18-inches, depending on what mill will be eventually receiving it.
"The pieces come back and they're all different sizes, shapes, so you have to figure out the best and most efficient way to cut it," Caldwell said. "You want to make the less cuts as possible, so each piece is a learning curve of the best way to cut it to get it down to size."
Those cut up pieces get sent to a mill where they're melted down and turned into new products.
"It can be anything, every mill makes a different product," Caldwell said. "So yeah, it could very well be made into a new beam that's gonna go up somewhere."
Besides learning about how to best recycle each piece of the bridge, Caldwell said she's also been able to learn about how it was built by looking at the pieces in her scrap yards.
"Back in the early 1900s to be able to make that suspension cable how they were able to take hundreds of pieces of very thin galvanized steel, and wrap it up and secure it and hold all these years, it's very, very neat," she said. "To know how much work it had to have been for them to make those suspension cables."
Helm Group plans to use controlled explosives later this summer to remove the towers and cables on the westbound span. Crews at Del's and Midwest Recyclers continue to work everyday to scrap the pieces from the implosion of the eastbound span and will then turn their attention to the rest of the old I-74 Bridge.