SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Federal Highway Administration sent engineers Wednesday to investigate what caused repairs to fail on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and drop 5,000-pounds of metal into rush-hour traffic lanes. The agency said it had not inspected the Labor Day weekend repairs made to the heavily used span.
Engineers from the federal agency will assist the state in determining why the fixes failed Tuesday, injuring one person and damaging three cars.
"That's the primary task at hand," said Nancy Singer, a spokeswoman for the highway administration.
High winds were hampering efforts to make repairs and reopen the bridge that carries about 280,000 cars each day.
Construction crews working through the night fought winds that gusted to 35 mph as they brought in heavy machinery to try to move the metal and make repairs.
"We have several thousand pounds of steel we have to place hundreds of feet off the deck, so worker safety is a concern," said Bart Ney, a spokesman for the state Transportation Department
There was a chance the bridge could reopen Thursday, he said, noting wind was a contributing factor in the failure of the rods.
Traffic was jammed on other San Francisco-area highways, as commuters s looked for alternatives to the bridge.
The pieces that broke were part of major repairs done last month after crews discovered a cracked link during an earthquake safety upgrade. The rods that broke were holding a saddle-like cap that had been installed over the cracked link.
When a rod snapped about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, it brought down a steel patch roughly three feet long, authorities said.
"It's a very fortunate situation," said California Highway Patrol Sgt. Trent Cross. "It was in the heart of the evening commute and you had a 5,000 pound chunk of metal fall approximately 100 feet."
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a civil engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has spent 20 years studying the Bay Bridge, called the initial crack a warning sign of potentially bigger safety issues with the bridge.
"The repair they were doing was really a Band-Aid," said Astaneh-Asl, who criticized Caltrans at the time for rushing to reopen the bridge.
Astaneh-Asl said the failure of the repair job demonstrates the need for a longer-term solution. The age and design of the bridge make it susceptible to collapse, especially if commercial tractor-trailers are allowed to continue using it, he said.
"I think Caltrans is putting public relations ahead of public safety," he said.
___
Associated Press Writers Sudhin Thanawala and Jason Dearen, and Video Journalist Haven Daley contributed to this story.
TV Station Profiles & Public Inspection Files forWFXL