________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
The final eight kilometers were through sand, beach sands up near the Tuy Hoa Air Force
Base and Phu Hiep. There construction was a matter of sand confinement and building upon
it. So, we really had quite different kinds of construction facing us.
You left the paddy area and went to sand at about the Ban Thach bridge. So, we had three
major different kinds of construction, and we'd go at them different ways. We had this huge
Ban Thach bridge, which took a considerable amount of activity and effort.
I had assigned one company responsibilities for Vung Ro Bay and the area south of Ban
Thach bridge. One company spent its time building the Ban Thach bridge, and one company
worked north and at Phu Hiep. The equipment support folks were running the quarry
operation, along with my equipment company. The asphalt platoon was out doing the paving
operations and manufacturing the asphalt, which we did in our own Barber Green plant,
which was located at the Phu Hiep compound. That was all under headquarters company.
The concrete detachment worked to place the concrete and form the precast concrete slabs
that were used for the deck of the bridge. It was assigned to the line company that was
building the bridge.
The other operations, the pipeline, the POL tank farm, and such, all were being done by
various parts of the companies, and always at a lesser priority. Daily, we would have an
operations meeting headed by the S3--often I would participate--where we would try to
shift equipment around on a priority basis to make sure we maintained production schedules.
Very definitely we kept things so that we continued to pave QL1 and we continued to push
bridge construction. If we needed a dozer because one was down, the one that was shaping
the berms in the ammunition point might not make it to the project that next day because it
would be diverted. We continually had to make operational kinds of decisions like that on the
allocation of equipment.
Q:
So, it was a big construction management job.
A:
Yes, it really was. We finished the chapel at Phu Hiep Army Air Base and put the roofs back
on the hangars. We did get the mission to clear and grub all the jungle around Vung Ro Bay
that Bob McDonald had said stay away from. We had our hands full on a whole bunch of
different kinds of things.
Q:
Maybe we can talk a little bit more about the Ban Thach bridge project. That seems like a
pretty sophisticated project for an engineer construction battalion.
A:
It was a very sophisticated project. We had--my recollection--13 spans with five 50-foot,
36-inch-wide flange steel stringers. We were precasting the concrete deck, hauling the slabs
to the site, and then welding them--we had weld plates cast into the slab--onto the stringers.
Something like that hadn't been done over there before. A big construction menu in
operation. It involved a lot of different things, a lot of priorities.
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