Barrera 1
Tatiana Barrera
Professor Munroe
ENC 1101
June 8 2013

The Smooth Operator
While the city of Miami goes about its typical day, a bright yellow monster sits idle, high above one of South Florida’s busiest roadway networks, the interchange of the Palmetto and Dolphin Expressways, known as Section 5. As midnight nears, the 140m-long, 43ft launching gantry comes alive, preparing to continue the only task, it was built to, erecting four segmental bridges in the heart of Miami. Those who use it call her the “Smooth Operator”.
The Launching Gantry or “The Smooth Operator” is an engineering marvel that is constructing the four main flyovers of the new interchange, not from the ground up but from the sky down, saving time and traffic hassles in the process. According to Connection Communities 826-836 the Launching Gantry was manufactured by Deal in Italy, then shipped in 40 containers by sea to Miami, and begins to arrive on May 2011, where was assembled on site (826-836.com). The Smooth Operator was designed specifically for Palmetto/Dolphin interchange project and will lay nearly 800 segments of overpasses
Barrera 2 almost two miles worth. Once the Launching Gantry is completed, the gantry measured 460 feet long and weigh approximately 260 tons. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1. By Robert Holmes
This little monster eliminates the conventional way of building bridge, which was the wood frame on site, casting concrete and then wait to be dry. It’s a slow process that if they used the construction could take more than 8 years to be finish, and not just that it also create a chaos with the traffic and that is what the Florida Department of Transportation is trying to avoid. As Marco Rosignoli said in his Article “Self-Launching Erection Machines for Precast Concrete Bridges”, these types of machines works not from the ground up but from the sky down, saving time and traffic hassles in the process (39). It lifts each segment of the bridge and move pier to pier to erect the bridge segment, and gently lowers them in place at the rate of two segments or so a day. Looks like a slow process but actually, the using of the Launching Gantry cuts the time to finish from 8 years to 5 years. Individual segments are 46 feet wide, vary from 8-10 feet long and can weigh anywhere between 50 and 80 tons, and there are constructed in a site in Hialeah and transported to the interchange (See Figure 2). Barrera 3

Figure 2. By 826-836.com
The Launching Gantry is operate remotely, with a remote control such us the Play station or Xbox controls (See Figure 3), Ricardo Ayala, an operator-in-training, marveled at the massive piece of machinery and the opportunity he’s been given to work with it, under close supervision. “It’s a lot of responsibility,” Ayala said of