Fixing the bridge, yet again

Jesse McKinley has an article in The New York Times about more work on the Bay Bridge:

Never has steelwork seemed so entertaining. Since Thursday night, when the traffic stopped and the blowtorching began, the attention of many in the Bay Area has been firmly focused on a huge construction project under way on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which connects the two cities. The project has drawn interest not only because of its complexity, but also because it has resulted in the first weekday closing of the bridge since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which caused a section of the bridge’s eastern span to collapse and prompted the seismic upgrade, of which the work this weekend is a part.
“All the innovations that we’re bringing to bear are to help the bridge withstand earthquakes,” Bart Ney, a spokesman for CalTrans, said in a presentation on the project’s flashy website, adding that the clock was ticking to “beat that next earthquake.”
So it is that residents, reporters, and retrofitting fans have been watching online and from afar as a swarming construction crew has slowly— oh, so slowly— worked to cut loose and replace an old 300-foot span of the bridge that connects the eastern span to a tunnel on Yerba Buena.
In its place will be a temporary bridge serving as a detour around the old piece, which will be demolished to make way for a new seismically correct piece. That piece will eventually be connected to two sleek, curving, side-by-side decks that will lead to and from Oakland, all by late 2013. Or at least that is the plan. The cost of the complete bridge retrofit has ballooned to more than $6 billion over the years, and there have been several delays.
On Friday afternoon, workers found themselves again falling behind schedule when the old piece of bridge, which dates to its opening in 1936, proved to be more stubborn than expected. “We anticipated it would take time, we just didn’t expect it to take this much time,” said Bill Casey, a resident engineer, who added, “You’re freeing a truss that’s been sitting there for seventy years.”
And, like anything that old and sedentary, there is more than a little groaning, with the bridge letting off a few loud metallic moans, which occasionally alarmed a few members of the press corps standing under the bridge’s ample shadow. But Mr. Ney reassured reporters that those sounds were normal for a bridge its age. “When you cut and move it,” he said, “it does funny things.”
By dusk Friday, crews had begun shifting the old piece of bridge out, inching it along lubricated skids. And as exciting as that sounds, it was not. One churlish member of the press likened it to watching paint dry, which, of course, was also happening on other parts of the bridge.
Indeed, with traffic suspended, officials from several agencies took the opportunity to spruce up the Bay Bridge, which has long labored in the shadow of the showier Golden Gate Bridge, which connects San Francisco to Marin County. Potholes were filled, light bulbs changed and lanes on both levels of the double-decker bridge touched up.
Firefighters, meanwhile, used the closing as a chance to practice rescues, with crews seen headed up the suspension cables on the bridge’s western span Friday afternoon. And while local subway trains seemed more crowded than usual on Thursday night, there were few problems reported with the Friday commute, possibly because of people fleeing early for the Labor Day weekend. Despite the Friday afternoon snag, officials said crews expected to finish their work by early Tuesday or ahead of schedule, as they did with a similar closing in 2007. “Just like 2007, we got out to a great start,” Mr. Ney said. “Demolition has proven to be a little challenging, but we’ve got a lot of time in our schedule.”

Rico says he was living in Oakland in 1989, when the earthquake took down the approaches to the bridge.