A few weeks ago Cliff noticed something white coming up by the airport as we crossed over the waterway bridge. It looked like a playground. As we are always looking for a good place to take Max, we paid close attention to what was happening down there.
If you look at any of the gallery photos you see a whole bunch of the old Southport Fisheries building which is slowly falling back to nature. I take pictures of it all the time. (Far more than I could ever post on the website.) Behind it (the area with no trees) and just down the road a little is the airport. (Here’s a link to their website: The Brunswick County Airport, and a page with a map:
http://www.mindspring.com/~tremick/gerj/brunsapt/maps.html.)
It’s a fairly small airport… You aren’t going to see any jets there, but it’s a very busy place with small aircraft and real estate flyovers and sky jumping and so forth… Lots of flying type things going on all the time.
Just at the very edge, between the old Southport Fisheries and the tip end of the airport by the waterway there is this strip of land…
On this strip of land is where Cliff saw the white thing going up. But it quickly got too big to be a slide. Then it got so big we weren’t sure what to think it was. I decided it must be something for the airport. Then there was a photo in our local paper showing the tall crane towering over a worker and yesterday Max and Ian had to go to therapy so I got to see it for myself.
Need to see how huge it is?
That’s all the way at the end of the road. It’s huge! So I did a little research and this is what I found in the Wilmington Star News:
Towering crane rises by airport
By Paul R. Jefferson
Staff Writer
A towering addition now dominates the skyline near the Brunswick County Airport, where looking up is a way of life � and work.
A tower crane, to be put to use building The Preserve condominiums at the base of the Oak Island Bridge along the Intracoastal Waterway, has caught the eyes of area residents and drivers on N.C. 133.
It�s also put airport pilots on notice, said Howie Franklin, the airport director.
“It�s not ours; they�re using it to build those condos,� Mr. Franklin said when asked about the steel structure reaching toward the heavens.
“It does look pretty menacing,� he added.
The tower crane is some 700 feet from the airport runway and reaches approximately 159 feet up into the airport�s airspace, he said.
Mr. Franklin said principals with The Preserve properly notified the airport of the tower crane�s presence. To avoid any possibility of airplane mishaps, Mr. Franklin said, the airport has already issued precautionary notices to pilots, with approval of the Federal Aviation Administration
“The procedure we follow is in place and activated,� Mr. Franklin said.
With FAA concurrence, advisories called Notices to Airmen, or notams, are issued with all filed flight plans concerning flights into or out of the Brunswick airport, Mr. Franklin said. The notices describe the location of the tower crane in relation to the airfield, its height and the fact that it will have blinking red warning lights attached to its top sections. The notams are broadcast regularly at the general aviation airport and will continue while the crane is erected.
“They just put the crane up yesterday, and already people have noticed,� Rod Hyson Sr., a Southport-based developer of The Preserve, said Tuesday. “We�re off to a rapid start.�
In a pre-construction sale, all 124 units in the project�s first phase sold within 90 days � before developers began marketing to the public in late September. Mr. Hyson is also a part-owner of the project and operates Bald Head Island Rentals and Cape Fear Realty.
The first three buildings will eventually be part of a development of 246 condominium residences on the 43-acre tract next to the airport, just off Long Beach Road at the foot of the Oak Island Bridge. And the high-rising crane will assist in building each one, said Mike Dickman, project manager for Superior Construction, general contractors for The Preserve.
“We can set the crane to any height we want,� Mr. Dickman said, noting that the crane “tops out� at a maximum height of 290 feet. “What we�re doing is setting the turntable at the height we�ll need it to be at the end of the project, and then work up to it.�
The tower crane is not a self-propelled machine, he said, unlike some larger construction cranes that can “jack� themselves up to a desired height when needed.
“Right now we�re in the middle of building one, and then when we finish (estimated for mid-August) we�ll dismantle it and put it back together for the second one,� and so on until completion next spring.
Each building takes approximately four months to build, he said.
The crane was trucked to the construction site from near Virginia Beach, Va., and assembled by workers hired by The Preserve�s concrete framing subcontractor, an owner of 27 cranes for rent to contractors and industries, Mr. Dickman said.
Paul Jefferson
This quiet little place is so going to change… It’s happening almost too fast to get a grip.
I just found this: http://www.superiorconstruction.com/work.html
That’s what that crane is going to build…. That first little picture there, “The Preserve Condominiums”…..
It tastes nasty. I’m gonna go dump it and get another glass and come back….
