Crews are working to replace about 50 to 60 of the recognizable cross-derringer pistols
on the Interstate 10 bridge.
The project is a small piece of a $5.7 million effort by the State Transportation Department
to repair and maintain the bridge.
Steve Giles, head of the District 7 Regional Transportation Office, explains the scope of
the replacement project, including the detail that went into casting the unique Derringer
pistols.
The six old damaged pistols that were removed from the old bridge railing, these have been
recast at a foundry in Alabama.
One of the new pistols recently recast at that foundry is there on the end of the table
here.
All these pistols have some damage.
It was deemed to be unrepairable as why they were discarded from the bridge.
We expect to get maybe 50 or so of these by the time the project is over.
You can see the detail that goes into these pistols.
It's hard to visually see those.
You're driving over then at the speed limit over the bridge, but you can see quite a bit
of detail went into them and it was pretty well duplicated, almost identical from the
old to the new.
I think they did a good job of casting these.
The handrails, we usually take the whole section out.
We have to close the section, one of the lanes of traffic to make it safe for our employees.
Move the post.
It's like a puzzle piece.
You can't just pull one out.
You've got to cut the top of the post in and find a way to get it in.
The post has to be recreated in, so it's quite a laborious task to get that done with all
the other hazards of highway work, elevated work on a bridge, over water.
It's a lot about the hazards factored into doing it.
Adley Cormier, Advocacy Chair of the Calcasieu Parish Historical Preservation Society, said
the I-10 bridge was originally planned to be named after French Pirateer Jean Lafitte,
who provided parcel and transportation services for people in the Lake area.
Cormier said the pistols serve as a tribute to Lafitte, whose legacy stretched beyond Lake
Charles to include the entire Gulf Coast region.
The farties when this was done, there was a great Louisiana renaissance of romance.
We had quite a number of local writers, and I'm talking about Louisiana writers, that
talked of the glorious past of Louisiana.
We have to remember that it was a war time, and the Second World War was a devastating
thing, and you needed things that connected people and tied people together, and it shared
history as one of those things that ties people together.
And so the glorious history of Louisiana, the romantic, glorious, exotic history of
Louisiana helped to keep the population's spirit up.
And of course, the bridge itself was viewed as a great connector.
It was one of the oldest transcontinental routes in the United States, Highway 90, which
in many cases followed the royal Spanish roads that connected Louisiana to Spanish Texas.
And we're talking about pre-colonial and colonial times.
So it was one of the links that helped to link Southwest Louisiana into the great network
of the United States, so it was symbolically very important.
