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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMore frightening problems: Corrosion plagues new Bay Bridge span
Doug Coe, a normally confident engineering manager for the new east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, walked into the nearby Oakland project office looking as if he were fighting back tears. Joel Sayre, then a bridge spokesman who worked there, remembers tensing in alarm.
Engineers had discovered an alarming corrosion problem with the "post-tension" tendons, and were pumping gallons of rusty water from the ducts that held them, Sayre said Coe told him. "Oh my god," he recalled Coe saying that afternoon in late spring of 2006. "What are we going to do?"
Coe, whom the California Department of Transportation would not permit to answer questions, was talking about thousands of steel tendons in the skyway section of the new span the elevated roadway that runs from the Oakland footing to the suspension bridge near Yerba Buena Island. Ducts containing the tendons, crucial to structural integrity, had been left unsealed. Rainfall and water used to cure concrete, tainted by construction debris exposed to salty bay mist, had entered many of them.
The bridge was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. Rusty water meant tendons had corroded. Sayre said Coe, lead skyway engineer, described a potential nightmare that could stop construction cold.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/18/5431401/corrosion-plagues-new-bay-bridge.html#storylink=cpy
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts)tularetom
(23,664 posts)I go into the city about once every five or ten years so it may not ever affect me.
AnotherMcIntosh
(11,064 posts)PCIntern
(25,518 posts)Typical of these Californication Engineers not to realize this...
of course...
Demo_Chris
(6,234 posts)Daninmo
(119 posts)Was/is this the bridge, the same one that had sections or such built by the Chinese, because US companies couldn't do the work?
AnotherMcIntosh
(11,064 posts)but was it the same Chinese company which built the cooling tubes for the san onofre nuclear power plant?
What could possibly go wrong?
Apparently it is more profitable for the international super-rich to outsouce manufacturing to China. It certainly is more profitable in the short-run.
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)which was discussed here, and turns out the bolts are American made.
Now this, with the ducts....
Whole sections of the bridge lanes were made in China, shipped here and assembled.
I am very happy I do not have to drive over that bridge. Wasn't too keen about driving on the old one.
The GG bridge did not faze, but the Oakland Bay one did.
XemaSab
(60,212 posts)Purrfessor
(1,188 posts)I'm now living in the Ohio River Valley. While some places have Scenic Overlooks, here along the Ohio River we have what are called Prayer Pullouts on each side of bridges spanning the river. People can safely stop, say a quick prayer prior to crossing, and proceed on their way. Maybe this is what is needed for the Bay Bridge.