The aforementioned tower on the Bay Bridge is apparently not much more popular among the Friscoes than it is with curmudgeonly anarcho-capitalists like myself ...
Monster of the Bay haunts legislators
It all started 15 years ago and the ensuing time has spawned a $5.1 billion bridge project
by Sean Holstege
The Oakland Tribune
From the Bay Area to the halls of the state capitol, policy makers agree -- publicly -- on only one thing about the new Bay Bridge: finish it.
Privately, many people connected with the tortured 15-year history of replacing the eastern span harbor nagging, fundamental doubts about the sleek tower that is supposed to rise near Yerba Buena Island.
Can it be built? Should it be built? Will it really survive a massive earthquake? Are there cheaper, better alternatives? And as the new bridge hits a cost of $5.1 billion and climbing, is it time to reconsider?
The firestorm of public debate over the last two weeks has swirled around one set of questions: How did California get saddled with a bridge that doubles in price every three years, who's to blame, and who should pay?
The reason for the work is widely understood, but less often talked about these days: the danger of a massive earthquake. Not so widely known is how vulnerable the existing 1936 eastern span still is and how badly damaged it was in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Weeks after the quake, Caltrans found that numerous inch-thick bolts that held the steel structure in place had sheered in half. A few more seconds of shaking would have sent an entire 288-foot section into the bay, they found. As it was, one 25-foot section of the upper deck collapsed onto the lower deck.
After spending $13 million in 1998 to temporarily strengthen the bridge, it still rests on the original fir timber piles that were driven into muck, not bedrock.
And after years of refined cost estimates; debates about whether to retrofit or replace the bridge; where the span should be built; and interventions by Bay Area politicians, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission decided in 1998 to build a self-anchored suspension tower.
California embarked on a mission to attempt a unique structure, building it to withstand a 1,000-year earthquake in one of the most active seismic regions in the world.
The tower was picked in a design
competition by a panel of international engineers and architects assembled by the MTC. When it was obvious that a cable-stayed design would win in a rubber-stamp vote, engineers chose not to fly in from around the world, participants said.
But it turned out not to be a rubber stamp after all. The remaining panel of architects fell in love with fresh drawings of the self-anchored tower.
The drawings were prepared so late that Caltrans and outside engineers had no time to assess whether the tower could even be built. The remaining panelists lacked the expertise to ask. The tower was recommended and MTC later rubber-stamped the plan, with no understanding of the real costs.
Famed bridge designer T.Y. Lin called it "a monument to stupidity" and even an engineer who stands to make money on the unique tower recently called it "the world's stupidest bridge."
It became Frankenstein's Monster, the engineer and others agreed. MTC had sewed on the head, Caltrans the legs, architects the torso, bike activists the arms. State lawmakers raised the money, applying the juice to bring the monster to life.
Six years later, what should have been a crowning accomplishment in the careers of everyone involved has become something out of control and feared.
That's one reason Jeff Morales, when he ran Caltrans, had to ask statewide for volunteers to work on the project. And why Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been unable to find a permanent Caltrans director in nine months. His candidates didn't apply and two in-house applicants were denied because they had worked on the fated bridge.
Last year Caltrans named Brian Maroney its best engineer in the state, but when headquarters could no longer ignore his prophetic warnings that the bridge couldn't be built in the time and money allotted, he was stripped of his job as Bay Bridge project manager. Caltrans engineers cringe when they talk about the project and private contractors are unusually skittish about letting outsiders watch the work.
There remain questions of safety. For years, UC Berkeley seismic expert, Professor Hassan Astaneh, warned the tower was dangerously imbalanced. After the Army Corps of Engineers prepared a seismic safety report in 2000, participants told Astaneh and former state seismologist Jim Slossen that they were directed to tone down the report. The engineers told Slossen and Astaneh the span was dangerous.
There may not have been adequate exploration of the soil conditions. They have been doing forecasts based on computer modeling, Slossen said, noting that those models are notoriously unreliable and Army Corps engineers told him they agreed.
The report itself is revealing in its diplomatic wording.
The replacement bridge does not meet (the set seismic) criteria, the Corps found, adding that Caltrans is moving along a path to design a bridge that meets seismic performance criteria.
The Army Corps recommended an independent check of the design and an evaluation of the design using known, not theoretical ground motions from a major earthquake on the San Andreas fault.
Nobody would look at it. All we wanted was an independent review and Caltrans refused, said Astaneh, who heard the internal debate. I think this bridge should not be built.
Caltrans engineers, past and present, point out that the design has withstood rigorous tests of simulated earthquakes on a shaker table at UC San Diego. One of the world's most experienced bridge building firms, American Bridge Co., along with its joint venture partners, has staked its reputation and millions of dollars on a bid to build the tower.
By 2002, Caltrans awarded bids on the first part of the bridge, a simpler causeway. The Monster was alive, and now it was wreaking havoc on its creators, gobbling up every available dollar the state had left.
A year before, the Legislature had a second chance to reassess the design. Instead, it passed a law for the second time committing the state to building the tower, identifying it by name.
Top Caltrans people were told only that the tower was extremely difficult and expensive, not impossible.
Not only were we building to a standard no one's ever tried before, but adding features no one's ever tried, said a source close to the project.
The price of the overall bridge had doubled, from $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion. Caltrans engineers, contractors and the press warned of more delays and overruns. Caltrans struggled to fashion a competitive bid on the tower for 16 months, the longest advertisement period in its history.
During that time top Caltrans officials brainstormed a radical Plan B: build a cheaper, "ornamental" tower, one that would look good but add nothing to the structural function of the bridge.
Caltrans' high-level Plan B never got past the conference table. Caltrans was forced to struggle with the consequences of another political decision made years before.
Because Gov. Pete Wilson used the bridge to push his view that work should be contracted out, preliminary design and engineering on all the Bay Area bridge jobs was done by outside firms, not Caltrans.
The remaining Caltrans engineers made mistakes. Design errors accounted for an approximately $300 million overrun on the new Benicia Bridge, a $250 million change to Richmond-San Rafael Bridge work and $564 million in changes to the current Bay Bridge work. Caltrans estimates taxpayers may have to pay $500,000 a day for cranes to sit idle while they wait to lift redesigned bridge parts.
With no Caltrans director, nobody knows who's accountable. The buck never stops, observers say.
Two weeks ago the Legislature seemed poised again to plow ahead, afraid to confront The Monster again. A bill by Assemblyman John Dutra, D-Fremont, would have the state award the bid for the tower. It failed to get through both chambers of the Legislature.
We're past that point. Nobody's looked at it and said you could save huge amounts of money. We ought to look at cost efficiencies and not going back to the drawing board, Kinsey said.
We just need to accept we've made our decision.
