CA: Troubles continue to dog the new SF Bay Bridge span

Corrosion plagues new Bay Bridge span

By Charles Piller
cpiller@sacbee.com

Published: Saturday, May. 18, 2013 - 8:30 pm | Page 1A
Last Modified: Monday, May. 20, 2013 - 1:56 pm


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. ....................(more)

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/18/5431401/corrosion-plagues-new-bay-bridge.html#storylink=cpy