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 Thursday, leaving nothing but a depression in the sand until the ocean waves fill the beach back in again.