Penalties assessed for flaws on bridge
Millions in fines will fall well short of covering fixes
The panel overseeing the Bay Bridge construction project voted Thursday to penalize the main contractor $11 million for the 2013 failure of steel rods intended to help the new eastern span survive an earthquake, as well as for shoddy work that could threaten hundreds of other rods in the tower foundation.
“We need to have a day of reckoning, and that is today,” said Steve Heminger, chairman of the three-member oversight panel that voted unanimously to penalize the contractor, the joint venture American Bridge/Fluor, and to formally accept the bridge.
Despite the penalty, the panel left open the question of whether toll payers will have to finance millions of dollars in both completed repairs and fixes that must still be made.
Panel member Will Kempton’s colleagues agreed with his description of the new span as
“magnificent.” But all three acknowledged at a meeting in Sacramento that continuing problems have dulled its luster.
“There were elements in the cost and the quality that were substandard,” said Heminger, who is also executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the Bay Area. “We need to hold those responsible to account.”
Rod penalties
The oversight committee — Heminger, state Transportation Commission chief Kempton and Malcolm Dougherty, head of Caltrans — voted to withhold $8 million from American Bridge/Fluor to help pay for the $24 million retrofit that was ordered after 32 rods snapped on the bridge’s seismic stabilizers just months before its opening in September 2013.
The panel also slapped a $3 million penalty on the main contractor for failing to protect more than 400 anchor rods at the tower’s base from flooding. Nearly all the rods were exposed to potentially destructive water when their sleeves flooded, and even after the sleeves were dried out, more than 100 refilled with saltwater.
One of the rods has broken, and many others have tiny cracks that could be an early sign of hydrogen embrittlement, the same problem that caused the failure of the 25foot-long rods on the seismic stabilizers in 2013.
American Bridge/Fluor representatives did not speak at the Sacramento meeting. They have previously defended the quality of the joint venture’s work and said they would help Caltrans fix the tower rods problem.
In addition to penalizing American Bridge/Fluor, the oversight panel sanctioned the bridge design joint venture T.Y. Lin International/Moffatt Nichol $8 million for its role in the 2013 rod debacle.
Left open was the question of who will pay for the remaining $8 million owed for the 2013 retrofit — as well as for most of the estimated $15 million to $25 million cost of a plan to keep the tower rods from being flooded.
The most likely answer is Bay Area drivers, who have already paid for the bridge’s $6.4 billion cost through tolls that were raised on all the local state-owned bridges starting in 1998.
Transit officials have said there is enough money in tollpayer-financed funds to cover the repairs without having to bump up the cost of driving across Bay Area bridges. Tolls were last raised in 2010.
“This is all wrapped inside our existing budget — no toll hike is under consideration, proposed or needed to handle the closeout of this project or other related work,” said Randy Rentschler, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
He said the agency hopes Caltrans will find a way to make Bay Area toll payers “whole. ... We’re working on ways to see that happen.”
Costs uncertain
Despite such assurances, bridge officials do not have a firm idea of how much the tower foundation’s repairs will eventually cost. Caltrans, which came up with the $15 million to $25 million estimate, has not begun the process of finding contractors to do the work.
Caltrans also will not concede that it was hydrogen embrittlement that caused the failure of the one rod that has broken at the tower’s base. Brian Maroney, the bridge project’s chief engineer, said Thursday that there is “no solid evidence at all” that hydrogen from water infiltrated the high-strength steel.
A Caltrans-hired consultant suggested in a report released Thursday that the rod failed from bending and too much tension.
Since only one rod has failed, Maroney said, there is no reason to spend additional toll-payer dollars on research to settle the issue. He acknowledged that some experts believe there is a “chance that maybe” hydrogen embrittlement did destroy the broken rod, but that given what Caltrans believes, it is not worth spending additional millions to find out.
Although some outside experts have said the anchor rods are an important seismic protection for the bridge, Caltrans says the span can survive a large earthquake without them. “The bottom of that tower is not going anywhere,” Maroney said.
Nonetheless, he said, the millions of dollars needed to protect the rods from invading saltwater amount to a prudent investment to guard against rust reducing the expected 150-year life span of the bridge.
“The water problem is not good,” Maroney said.