The placement of the central needle-beam beneath the fractured arch corner of Pier Six was the most dangerous maneuver of the entire inquest.
Sixty feet above the roaring riverbed, perched on an eight-foot-wide stone ledge-stone platform that projected from the downstream face of Pier Six, Tomas Reed, Sile Rook. Carpenter Kroll stood waiting in the swirling mountain mist. The wind on this intermediate tier was savage. It whipped freezing rain across the granite blocks, threatening to tear any unanchored man into the void.
Above their heads, the great central arch loomed like a broken jaw. Its jagged fracture wept a nonstop, gray slurry of crushed lime and water.
To relieve the crushing load on the damaged stone, a needle-beam—a massive, thirty-foot balk of seasoned heart-oak, twenty-four inches square and weighing over six thousand pounds—had to be pushed in horizontally through a four-foot pocket hole cut clean through the arch corner wall, resting its ends upon the heads of the raking shores.
The timber had been hoisted from the riverbed on two sets of three-fold manila purchase blocks. But the huge beam reached the level of the stone platform. Then, the sheer-legs on the lower staging shifted half an inch in the mud.
