Added: 02/19/2006 |
Aerial lift as an attraction travel deviceAn aerial lift is commonly applied in the construction industry to transport workers and equipment to high elevations and bring them back down. It comes in several types, depending on the way an aerial lift raises or lowers a platform or a bucket. Everywhere in the construction industry, it is considered dangerous to use an aerial lift, whereas it requires taking safety precautions to avoid injuries. The majority of incidents depend on the fact that people ignore safety tips and requirements, using an aerial lift, but not on the quality of it. The majority of deaths are related to electrocutions, falls and carelessness, which could have been avoided by strictly following safety precautions. Some general precautions of using an aerial lift include setting up a lift on a flat stable ground, always utilizing the doors or chains, which are provided on a lift platform or bucket, always standing with your feet on the ground of an lift and not standing on chains or rails, and not exceeding the manufacturer's recommended load capacity.
In addition to its application in the construction and building industry, an aerial lift and its variations have found their usage as popular amusement attractions, as well as places of historic significance. For instance, an aerial tramway or a cable car is a variant of an aerial lift often employed to carry passengers from one mountain peak to another high above the scenic rugged terrain in recreational tourism areas. An aerial tramway is not connected with deaths or incidents; at least, mass media has not announced such cases. On the contrary, an aerial tramway is considered an extraordinary and enjoyable travel device.
What concerns an aerial lift on its own, there is perhaps one major attraction of this particular kind, which is the Duluth Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, Minnesota. Being an internationally recognized symbol for Duluth, the Aerial Lift Bridge, built in 1905, started its operation as an extremely rare vertical lift bridge, the first of two such bridges in the United States. Upon its completion in 1905, the bridge?s gondola had a capacity of sixty short tons (fifty four metric tons) and could carry three hundred and fifty people in addition to wagons, streetcars or automobiles. The modern reconstructed structure was put into effect in 1930, and today the Aerial Lift Bridge can be raised in fifty five seconds and goes up twenty five to thirty times daily during busy parts of the shipping season. The span is about three hundred and ninety feet or one hundred and twenty meters.
The Stillwater Bridge is another aerial lift bridge in Minnesota (connecting Wisconsin). The Stillwater Bridge, featuring a counterweighted, cable-and-tower design, embodies engineering significance as a rare surviving example of a vertical-lift highway bridge construction of the Waddell and Harrington type. Although the Stillwater Bridge is not used today for transportation, it has significance, though as a rare type of engineering construction. Only six vertical-lift highway bridges were built in Minnesota and Wisconsin before World War II, and the Stillwater Bridge is one of three that still survives.
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