High Anxiety
by Clyde Weiss
The Verrazano bridge, spanning New York Harbor from Staten Island to Brooklyn, is the “office” for a half-dozen nimble members of Local 1931. Join them — vicariously — as they perform their daunting tasks.
HIGH ABOVE NEW YORK HARBOR
With the sure-footed and fearless grace of mountain goats, AFSCME members Robert Sabella, John Melendez and Tommy Devereux ease themselves over a railing and onto one of four cables that support the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.
Nearly 700 feet below, tanker ships that look more like bathtub toys cut white swaths through the harbor as they pass beneath what today is the world’s fourth-longest suspension bridge. (It was the longest when it opened in 1964.) The span, named for the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano, is so long that its designers had to take into account the curvature of the earth.
Wearing full-body harnesses linked to guide wires, and soft gum-sole shoes that grip the grooved surface, these steel-nerved members of Local 1931 (DC 37), slowly traverse the soaring, three-foot-wide cable. They are employees of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA), which operates seven bridges and two tunnels in New York. As such, it’s their job to change a lot of light bulbs: every two years, the Verrazano’s decorative “necklace lights”; and every year, the aviation lights required by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Working on the cable is not a job requirement. The men who do it volunteer, and they take pride in the work. Every time his three young daughters see the Verrazano, “they point to everybody and say, ‘That’s daddy’s bridge!’” boasts Melendez.
As a former U.S. Army parachutist, the 43-year-old bridge maintainer is no stranger to danger. And up on the cable, he’s not fearful. “You have to trust your equipment,” Melendez explains. “Besides, the only way we’re actually going to fall off is if the bridge falls down.” Still, he adds, “Anything can happen, and you have to be aware all the time.”
What’s it like way up there? These technicians offer straightforward answers, not poetry. “I’d climb on the cable, on the girders, more than I’d want to go up a ladder,” says Sabella, 42, who has been with TBTA for 20 years. Devereux, 40, is even terser: “I just focus on what I’m doing. If it’s a nice day, you get a nice view.”
Ken Dybing, 43, is closest to poetic. “You get a feeling of exhilaration and freedom,” he reflects. “You’re in the most densely populated area in the United States, and here you are, with nobody around you” — save your partners and a pair of dive-bombing peregrine falcons that live on the bridge.
Nobody has ever fallen from the cable. Attached to the guide wire, nobody could. But years ago, when workers were hooked to the cable by a belt tied only around the waist, a slip could have meant serious injury.
On the roadway, meanwhile, “ground man” Bruce Campbell waits by his truck. Oddly, because of the passing vehicles, it’s more dangerous there than up high.
Coincidentally confirming this fact, three cars collide on the bridge while the cable walkers descend. Campbell, luckily, is on the opposite side of the bridge.
