She Moves!
Sankaty Light travels more than 200 feet on Monday and Tuesday
BY PETER B. BRACE INDEPENDENT WRITER
At 8:36 a.m. on Oct. 1, three minutes after International Chimney site superintendent Skellie Hunt christened the lighthouse with a bottle of champagne, Sankaty began its 405-foot crawl away from the edge of the bluff.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent

On the first day of moving the 500- ton, 70-foot lighthouse, Expert House Movers of Sharpstown, Md. pushed the historic light around 140 feet, well over the 80 to 110 feet that was anticipated. The light was moved another hundred feet yesterday, said Jerry Matyiko, president of Expert House Movers.

'Sconset Trust President Bob Felch beamed with excitement in describing the first two days' progress.

"They've been great, we've had fantastic weather," he said. "The ease of the first days was because of the level ground, but the move path today has a drop of roughly 12 feet."

Expert House Movers will guide the light through a series of two-foot steps downward using a foundation of square oak timbers, or cribbing, to lower the lighthouse onto roller beams at the lower elevations. It will then push the lighthouse along to the next drop in height where more cribbing will be employed to keep lowering the lighthouse down.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent Sankaty Lighthouse casts a shadow on the North Bluff where an "aerial" view (courtesy of the Nantucket Fire Department's ladder truck) shows the moving light part way down its projected path. It will come to rest on the concrete pad seen to the left of the lantern house.

"There's a point in the move over the next day or so where they will lower the lighthouse," said Felch. "It will probably be two or three lowering stages, so it's a busy construction site: they're picking up these beams and moving them around the lighthouse and they're moving several thousand cribbing logs."

As Matyiko said, the move became more difficult yesterday, both because of the 12-foot drop in elevation and also because of scrub oak thickets pinching the lighthouse on either side, making it difficult to maneuver construction vehicles and roller beams around the site without leveling too much of the native vegetation.

Going downhill slows the move - instead of just using the unified jacking system of horizontal hydraulic jacks to inch the lighthouse along roller beams with 16, 75- ton roller dollies, Matyiko and his crew must stop at drops in the path, build up cribbing so it is level with the path elevation, lay down roller beams and move on to the next dip in height.

"You keep it level on the roll beams [while] building up cribbing beneath them," said Matyiko. "When the roll beams get to be about four feet off the ground, we will lower the roll beams about two feet and then lower the building and then we lower the roll beams two more feet until we get down to the level that you want to move along at."

The other major moving event that occurred during the last week was a behind-the-scenes shift in Sankaty's ownership. The transfer of the lighthouse from the U.S. Coast Guard to the 'Sconset Trust through the Nantucket Historical Association happened last Thursday afternoon, Sept. 27, when all parties agreed the conditions of the transfer were met.

The transfer worked because the Trust had a plan in place to move the lighthouse inland, diligently pursued the plan since 1994 and is committed to preserving its use and its history. Two years prior to the transfer, the NHA's board of trustees unanimously voted on Oct. 14, 2005 to take momentary ownership of the lighthouse before passing it on to the Trust. Federal legislation adopted in 1992, allowing the Coast Guard to transfer lighthouse ownership to local historical organizations like the NHA or the 'Sconset Trust, made the transfer legal.

Matyiko said he expected to wrap up the run down the roller beams to the five-foot thick concrete foundation by the weekend. Felch believes the lighthouse will be resting comfortably on the ground by Columbus Day.

"That process of removing the beams and lowering the lighthouse should take us through the weekend," he said.

On the sidelines of the site itself, where Expert House Movers fenced off a viewing area on Baxter Road overlooking the move path, Felch reported 30 to 40 people an hour checking out the move at any given time. As Baxter Road is closed to traffic from Bayberry Lane, Sankaty Head Golf Club is now allowing move watchers to park in their parking lot and is transporting them back and forth to the viewing area, said Felch.

So far, Felch said, they have had no problems with people wanting to watch the move, largely because of the more than 70 Trust volunteers working the site area and the

Nantucket Police Department managing traffic. I