No one wants to make a splash; maintaining a huge bridge is an endless, grueling job.

No one wants to make a splash

Maintaining a huge bridge is an endless, grueling job

As high as 385 feet above the waters of Los Angeles Harbor, where winds can whip at 45 miles an hour and certain death is a misstep away, a Sisyphean challenge is answered every working day: Keeping the 1.1-mile-long Vincent Thomas Bridge properly painted.

"Five days a week, Monday through Friday, we have four journeyman painters and three apprentices and myself on the bridge," says Bill Hansel, 36, structural steel painter supervisor for Caltrans, the state agency that runs the bridge. "This fiscal year we plan to paint 112,000 square feet of the bridge. After seven years to 10 years the bridge is painted, but then we have to start all over again."

The deposed king Sisyphus, of Greek myth, had the eternal task of rolling a huge boulder up a hill in Hades. The nemesis of the Vincent Thomas is just as persistent and even more ancient than Sisyphus' boulder: airborne salt, which is mightily corrosive to the bridge's steel pillars, pylons and suspension cables. "Salt is exactly the enemy," says Hansel. "It never stops, so we never stop."

If the 27-year-old Vincent Thomas bridge, which connects the mainland to docks on Terminal Island, was unguarded by Hansel's paint, rust would ruin the structure in about seven years, say structural engineers.

Relentless rust forces painters high over the water, onto catwalks and scaffolds that sway with the bridge in a zephyr. The first time out, more than 200 feet above the ocean, is tough, say the apprentices. The way up above the bridge is by a small, open-air elevator.

"When you go up in the basket the first time, you get jitterbugs. Then you get out on a catwalk, and you notice the bridge is moving in the wind," says Libo Gomez, 36, apprentice painter with 10 months under his belt. "And in winter, when the wind blows, it is so cold it feels like your ears are going to break off." Gomez has been to the top of one of the bridge's twin towers, which are 385 feet high.

To battle the elements, the height, and paint fumes, Gomez and other painters first put on 45 lbs. of gear before clambering out on the steel.

The load includes a hard hat, goggles, an air respirator, a safety belt, overalls, gloves and boots. Eight months of the year, long johns must be worn to protect against biting wind.

On every venture onto the Vincent Thomas, cables are attached to the safety belts of Gomez and other painters, which are then connected to the bridge itself. It is the last line of defense should scaffoldings and other platforms fail. For this, a journeyman painter makes about $30,000 a year.

While there have been no fatalities at the Vincent Thomas, death has visited those who wield paint brushes hundreds of feet above water. In 1982 an apprentice painter on the Caltrans-operated Carquinez Bridge in the Bay Area plunged to his death, a fact not lost on the Vincent Thomas painters.

"It is teamwork, members of the paint crew must back each other up," says Gary Zimmerman, 26, who is the youngest journeyman-level painter in California. "Safety has to be No. 1. Once you have established safety, then comes production." (Painters graduate from apprentice to journeyman in two years, and usually have previous industry experience.)

Sometimes the painters create unique platforms and winches to lessen the dangers and increase production. A former bridge painter, Bill Onderdonk, devised a "spider basket," which allows painters to safely dangle in a metal enclosure, hanging from either of the bridge's two, horizontally strung, main suspension cables.

The baskets allow the painting of vertically strung steel suspension ropes, some nearly 200 feet in length, which connect the roadbed to the massive suspension cables of the Vincent Thomas.

"That's the hardest part of the painting job, those suspension ropes," says Hansel. "But the baskets are pneumatically powered, which allows the painters to maneuver around pretty quickly."

The green-painted Vincent Thomas is the largest bridge in Southern California, so keeping it properly coated requires Brobdingnagian volumes of paint and undercoatings. About 11,800 gallons for the seven-year paint cycle, according to Hansel's estimates and detailed logs of work.

Despite the vast amounts of metal that need a fresh coat, only a minority of a painter's time is spent actually applying paint. If getting to and fro at 385 feet in the air in a safe fashion is time consuming for the bridge-painters, site preparation is even more so.

Typically, old paint must be sand-blasted or washed with high-pressure water hoses -- again by painters who must tarry with cables and maneuver baskets about the bridge.

Then, two undercoats must be brushed, rolled or sprayed on, each of which takes a day to dry.

Only then can two finish coats, of green latex paint, be applied. "We spend only about 30 percent of our time actually painting," says Hansel. "And less than half of that time putting on the finish coats."

The slow nature of the work, and its never-ending quality, is both appealing and frustrating to the eight-man paint crew. "It is frustrating sometimes, especially when you consider the amount of work that goes into painting each part of the bridge," says painter Zimmerman.

On the other hand, all the painters seem to love the work and the environs, and the fact that lifetime employment is virtually assured.

"We see peregrine falcons hunt out here, they fly off the bridge," says supervisor Hansel. "They like to hunt teal, a type of sea duck."

Apprentice painter Michael Edmundson, 33, comments, "Sometimes we find a leg or other remains of a bird the peregrine has eaten." The peregrine lives on top of Long Beach City Hall, but pursues his craft from the Vincent Thomas, say the painters.

While painting the bridge is unending, there are variations in the routine, says Hansel. In 1984, for example, the painters switched from an oil-based paint to a latex paint, which is water-based. Although the switch was made primarily for environmental reasons, the new paint is superior to the old, he says. "The latex paint stretches and breathes with the structure, which moving in the wind and constantly expanding and contracting with the weather," says Hansel. "The oil-based paint tended to crack. That let in the salt."

PHOTO : Lofty brushwork: Bridge painters fight erosion

PHOTO : Construction: The twin towers on Vincent Thomas Bridge, built in 1963, stand 385 feet tall

PHOTO : Apprentice painter: Libo Gomez