And Now for the Hard Part...
Crews to thread a 5,000-ton cable across new Bay Bridge span and back again
Crews will begin installing the huge steel cable that will hold up the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge this week. Currently, temporary steel structures support the bridge.
At a media briefing Monday morning, Malcolm Dougherty, the acting director of the California Department of Transportation, called the cable installation "the most significant and challenging" part of constructing the span.
The cable is 2.6 feet in diameter and nearly a mile long. It weighs 5,291 tons, or nearly 10.6 million pounds, and is made up of 137 steel strands, each one composed of 127 steel wires. Each wire is strong enough to hold up a Hummer, Caltrans spokesman Bart Ney said Monday.
The cable will travel from the Oakland side of the span to the San Francisco side and back again. The 2,047-foot self-anchored suspension span will be the longest of its kind in the world.
On Monday, crews lifted a giant spool of steel strands from a barge onto the deck of the new span. Crews will anchor one end of each strand on the Oakland side of the span, underneath the deck.
Using machinery that looks like a ski lift, they will then thread the strands along the path of bright orange catwalks that have been attached to the new tower for several months. The strands will go up to the top of the center tower and down to the San Francisco side of the span, where they will be looped underneath the deck of the bridge, then threaded back up to the tower and back down to the Oakland side of the bridge. There, crews will anchor the other end of the strands.
Ney said it will take a few months to complete the installation. Once all the strands are installed, crews will bind them together and coat them with zinc paste.
The installation of the cable will mark a major milestone for Caltrans, which plans to open the new, seismically safer span in the fall of 2013, 24 years after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged the existing bridge.
Like most of the steel on the bridge, the cable was made in China. It was manufactured by Shanghai Pujiang Cable Co. at a cost of $28 million, Ney said.
Caltrans had proposed building a cheaper bridge without a suspension cable, but Bay Area lawmakers insisted on a "signature span." The new span will cost $6.3 billion, according to Ney.
The Golden Gate Bridge is also a suspension bridge, but it has two cables — one on the bay side and one on the ocean side of the span. Ney said Caltrans chose to use just one cable for the sake of efficiency and aesthetics.
Edward Liu
It will take California 24 years to retrofit the Oakland Bay Bridge, at a price tag of $ 6.4 billion, and rising.... more than 4 times its original budget when the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake struck and the decision was made to fix and retrofit this bridge.
And California officials boast that this is a "signature piece" of bridge-building..... except that the steel and steel suspension cable are proudly "made in Shanghai." :-)
Talk about how bad California has been dumbed down to. This piece of engineering is nothing to brag about. Guess what? Shanghai built its high-speed rail linking its city to Beijing... a distance equivalent to Los Angeles to San Francisco, is two years, within budget. This is one-twelveth (1/12) the time it took for California to fix a damn bridge.
Greece had collaspsed. California will follow soon. This once great state is out of the competition. The world of globalization has left this once great state in the dust. And now they are talking about building high-speed rail linking L.A. with San Francisco @ $ 100 billion? Are you kidding?
Edward Liu
There outta be a reality check by these bozos who manage and do our public works infrastructures --- whether bridge-building, roads, or airports. The common sight that is clearly observable on many of these public projects is that you see one poor sap actually doing the grunt work, and the heavy lifting... and five others standing around, chit-chattng away, with hard-hats on... doing nothing. Nada. On any road-building, you see tons of equipments lying around at curbside, but hardly any work is being observed. The work force is nowhere in sight. Public works in Japan is once seen as bad, controlled by mobsters - the Yakuza. California is worse. Nobody works anymore in this once great state. It's public works bureaucracy and work force are infested with slackers, feather-bedders, and lazy bums on the time-clock. No wonder California is dead broke.