The Night I Looked Like a Bridge-Fixing Lunatic

Hi, I’m John Lange, an electrician for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. I am responsible for maintaining three of the state’s most critical drawbridges—or at least I was when I wrote this. Who knows what future-me is up to now?

After almost thirty years on the job, I’ve got plenty of memories of drawbridge fails and fixes, but there’s one that still makes me laugh every time I think about it.

First, let me paint you a picture of what I was working with. If you’ve never seen a vertical lift bridge, imagine a giant elevator for cars. The road span hangs between towers, suspended by huge wire cables. When boats need to pass, the whole span lifts straight up, keeping both ends perfectly level—what we call “skew control.” If one end gets more than 6 inches higher than the other, the safety systems kick in and shut everything down. When that happens, some poor maintenance worker (usually me) has to come fix it.

This particular story starts on a hot summer day at an old farmhouse I was renting, about 30 minutes from one of my bridges. I’d spent hours mowing and weedeating the massive yard—a chore I oddly found relaxing. After a shower, I crashed on my bed, hair still wet, and dozed off.

Hours later, the phone jolted me awake. It was a bridge operator reporting a skew problem and he had traffic stuck. Still groggy, I started gathering details while fumbling into clothes. The operator told me one end of the bridge was higher than the other, so I gave him my usual fix: a series of steps to follow that would release the brakes on the high end and let gravity do its thing. Simple, right?

Wrong. Instead of leveling out, the high end went even higher. Weird. I walked him through the steps again, thinking he must have missed something. Same result—the high end of the bridge kept climbing. I told him I was on my way.

Five minutes from the bridge, things got worse. The operator called back in a panic saying there was a fire in the electrical cabinet room. He’d put it out with an extinguisher and called the fire department. Now, I love firefighters, but the thought of them taking axes and foam to my delicate electrical equipment gave me nightmares. We’re talking hundreds of relays, contactors, and timers, plus miles of wiring—none of which play nice with firefighting techniques.

I managed to beat the fire trucks there by seconds. Racing in, I killed power to the whole bridge, then started running between rooms, yelling at every firefighter I passed: “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!” (with some colorful language thrown in for emphasis).

The fire’s cause was pretty simple—a plastic bushing had melted on top of one of our resistor banks (think giant toaster-looking things that control current to the motors). They are actually designed to get very hot so that wasn’t our real problem. In the third control cabinet, I found what I was looking for: a welded contactor.

Now, this bridge was like something out of an old sci-fi movie—huge knife switches, massive fuses, and these enormous electrical contactors that connected power cables with a satisfying magnetic slam. One of these contactors had welded itself in the “up” position, constantly trying to raise that side of the bridge even when it shouldn’t. That’s what caused the resistors to overheat and start the fire.

The fix? In my infinite professional wisdom, I started kicking the contactor. Hard. Four or five good kicks later, the mechanical interlock broke the welded contacts free, and we were back in business. I restored power and lowered the bridge like nothing had happened.

As the firefighters were leaving, one of them nervously asked if everything was okay. He seemed more interested in the bridge operator’s confirmation than mine, and they all kept giving me these strange looks.

It wasn’t until I got home that I understood why. Looking in the mirror, I nearly jumped at my reflection. My wet hair had dried into something that looked like a bird’s nest during a hurricane. Even worse, in my half-asleep rush, I’d put on my nasty yard-work clothes—previously soaked with sweat and covered in grass clippings. Although now dry, I smelled like a gym locker that had been marinating in the sun.

No wonder the firefighters looked at me like that! From their perspective, some wild-haired, filthy, sweat-soaked maniac had come charging in, screaming orders and solving electrical problems by kicking things. I’m honestly shocked they didn’t tackle me on sight.

Sometimes I wonder if any of those firefighters are still around, sharing stories about the night a crazy person showed up to fix their local drawbridge—and turned out to be the actual maintenance guy. It wasn’t my most professional moment, but I did get the job done.