The Challenge
The buried precast concrete anchors for the cables on the Little Fort Ferry were beginning to fail so Argo and the Ministry of Transportation came to us for some expert advice on how to retension the cables. They wanted something that was longer lasting and innovative while making it simple in the future to retension as needed.
The Solution
In October 2020, CEC designed a new anchoring system using screw piles installed at an angle to optimize the resistance on the pulling cables. We fabricated a plate lug on the end of a screw pile to attach a sheave and a come-along onto to the anchor. We designed this lug so that it would be able to hold the cable with one end, and hold tension with the come-along on the other end. It took a lot of force to switch the cables from the old anchor to the new one, but we managed to do it without losing the tension on the line.
