Thaindian News

April 26, 2010 (Pen Men at Work): There is no uncertainty that societies around the San Francisco Bay are going to be thumped by the same sort of calamitous earthquake that only just walloped Haiti, Chile and China.

Most individuals in the Bay Area are aware of that. But they may not be conscious of the fact that their most essential helping hand to the outside globe is also one of the feeblest. It is the Bay Bridge linking San Francisco to Oakland.

In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake ruthlessly smashed the Bay Bridge. At the time, California’s foremost engineers expounded that it was a potent forewarning that the bridge required to be made foolproof and had to be immune from earthquakes. Their testimony was referred to as ‘Competing Against Time.’

Twenty years later, a new marvel of engineering is mounting across San Francisco Bay. But it is still under production. There is a push to wind up the job before the next immense earthquake wallops the area.

The Golden Gate is the most documented bridge in the globe. Many experts would declare that it is also San Francisco’s most gorgeous. California’s economy, nonetheless, depends heavily on the Bay Bridge. With virtually 250,000 automobiles traversing it every workday, it is one of the active bridges in the globe.

However, rather alarmingly, the spokesperson of the Californian Department of Transportation (Caltrans), Bart Ney, has explicated that there is an issue with the Bay Bridge. He has divulged that, if a colossal earthquake punches the area now, that structure is going to have to cope with an enormous amount of difficulty.

Ney has revealed that portions of the bridge could go under water if a giant earthquake occurs. Caltrans is the bureau tasked with the challenge of rapidly making the Bay Bridge area as secure as possible from the vicious earthquakes.

The Bay Bridge is in fact two bridges. The western span reaches from San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island and is now more potent. In 2004, Caltrans concluded replacing half a million rivets with bolts and attached 17 million tons of extra steel. This span is anchored to bedrock.

But the eastern span, stretching two miles to Oakland, is feebler. It parks itself unsteadily atop the trunks of Douglas fir trees, which were driven into the mud in excess of 75 years ago. Despite worries over its power, it is still in operation while a fresh bridge is constructed alongside.

Failure of the Bay Bridge is not just a manifestation of apprehensiveness; it is also a memory of what happened in 1989.

Ney has expounded that that was the site where they had the crash during the Loma Prieta earthquake. He picked out the upper deck of the existing Bay Bridge. Exactly, that top span disintegrated onto the lower span.