The California Department of Transportation's decision to save money by hiring a Chinese company that had never built a bridge to build major parts of the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was troubling to begin with. A major
Sacramento Bee investigation
pushes it from troubling to terrifying. The article, by Charles Piller, details how Caltrans management was determined to stick with Chinese contractor ZPMC even as Caltrans inspectors repeatedly caught the company making significant mistakes and failing on quality control measures:
But committee chair Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, suggested that Caltrans had tried to cover up serious problems with “a deliberate and willful ... attempt to obfuscate.”
His comments were echoed by experts inside and outside Caltrans – some of whom supervised the welding and warned of serious flaws. They said the state bought a bridge likely to require extraordinary and costly maintenance. [...]
Professional engineers, he said, must report “any irregularities that could affect public welfare.” That’s what [Doug Coe, a Caltrans engineer who worked on the project in China] and his colleagues did.
“But (Caltrans) has the prerogative to accept these (cracked or suspect parts), ‘fit for purpose,’ ” Coe said. That’s what Caltrans managers did.
The whole thing is really
worth a read, but the bottom line is this: Caltrans started out by hiring an inexperienced company labeled as "high risk" and given only a contingent pass by an expert to build parts of a major bridge in an earthquake-prone location. Then, when problems were found by Caltrans' own engineers, its managers said they weren't really problems and threw more money at the project, leading to cost and time overruns after having hired ZPMC because it would supposedly be cheap and fast. Caltrans is insisting that the bridge is safe despite what Piller describes as a "litany of problems" including "suspect foundation concrete, broken anchor rods and rust on the suspension span’s main cable." The problem is, it's not clear Bay Area commuters should believe that.
Comments are closed on this story.