Criminal

I am hereby calling for a criminal investigation of CalTrans and the Bay Bridge repair contractor, C.C. Myers Inc. It’s a miracle the failure of the bridge repair did not kill several people, less than two months after the original repair work.

Blaming yesterday’s moderate breeze — in the 20-30 mph range around the bridge — is unacceptable. The original bridge lasted for 70+ years in all sorts of weather conditions. The bridge has to be functional every day, not just in good weather.

Someone has to have been criminally negligent in this incident.

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UPDATE: Go here for an excellent rundown of the problem and its repair.

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3 Comments

  1. I believe the statute of limitations would have expired by now on work done in the 30’s. The only crime, the real crime, is that it now takes us 25 years (fixing the east span after ’89, opening in 2013+) to do half of what our grandparents did in a few years in the 30’s, without computers and on budget. Meanwhile we spend 700% of a pre-inflated budget for weak approximations of portions of their work.

    Or do you actually think Long’s should be held liable for giving its customer the band-aid it asked for, when it needed brain surgery?

  2. Who installed the 5,000-pound piece of steel that only lasted about seven weeks before falling on unsuspecting drivers who assumed that when CalTrans said the repair “went perfect” that meant the bridge was safe for traffic? I don’t think it was the people who built the original bridge in the 1930s.

  3. Yes, what’s so scary about this is that the broken cable was not one of the original cables, dating from the 1930’s but one that’s far more recent. I keep wondering what happened to quality control, who produced the steel and where did our “can do” ethic go?
    The bridge needs one of those protective deities that you have up on the Asian Museum blog along with some followers of Kali to drag off and punish those responsible for the shoddy work.