BALTIMORE — A dance of heavy machinery is playing out on the Patapsco River as hundreds of tons of steel move intricately to rebuild an iconic piece of Baltimore infrastructure.

The Maryland Transportation Authority is installing test pilings to determine if current designs created by Kiewit will operate as expected for the new Key Bridge replacement.

"We have two of the largest rotating cranes on the east coast here. Those are necessary because of the sheer size of the piles that we're using here. They're 200 feet long. They're 8 feet in diameter, 1.5 (feet) thick walls. They are in the range of 340,000 pounds each," said Brian Wolfe, MDTA engineer.

Each pile is slammed into the channel floor by a hammer that weighs more than 100 tons.

"What this load frame and this load test program

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