With a crowd of spectators lounging in lawn chairs and snapping photos, workers on Wednesday started cutting up the boxcar-sized Japanese dock that was torn away from a fishing port by last year's tsunami and washed up on an Oregon beach.

The plan is to cut the 165-ton concrete dock into five slices, like a loaf of bread, using a piece of equipment called a wire saw. If all goes well, the work should be finished by today, leaving nothing but a depression in the sand until the ocean waves fill the beach back in again.

"We really are trying to keep in mind that this came from a massive disaster in Japan and try to treat it with the respect it deserves," Scott Korab, director of business development for Ballard Diving and Salvage of Vancouver, Wash., said over the low rumble of the wire saw and the roar of the wind.