New beams, jacks ready to bolster transit hub
Hydraulic jacks and newly fabricated steel beams arrived Sunday morning at San Francisco’s Transbay Transit Center , where they’ll be used to shore up the spot over Fremont Street where cracks were discovered in two girders last week.
Both the $2.2 billion transit center, which opened just six weeks ago, and Fremont Street between Howard and Mission streets, will remain closed Monday — and likely for the rest of the week — as crews install bracing on the damaged building and test the damaged steel support beams.
Mark Zabaneh, director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, which built and operates the three-block-long transit center, said that by 11 a.m., four large hydraulic jacks had arrived at Fremont Street along with several steel beams just fabricated in the Central Valley.
A wood-and-steel pad has been constructed in the center of Fremont Street, and jacks will be placed on the pad and used along with vertical steel beams to support the building and take pressure off the cracked girders.
“We’re reinforcing and erecting shoring as materials arrive,” Zabaneh said as workers unloaded steel beams from a flatbed truck near Fremont and Mission streets.
By midnight Sunday, initial stabilization — the first of three phases of shoring up the transit center — was completed, said TJPA spokeswoman Christine Falvey.
It’s not yet clear how long the whole process will take, but by Monday or Tuesday, he said, authorities should have a better idea of when they can partially open Fremont Street.
“This is a very slow and methodical process,” he said.
Once crews install the temporary bracing, it will relieve weight from the damaged girders and allow extensive testing to help determine the cause of the cracking. It could take a week or longer to get results of those tests, he said.
The sleek, white transit center was abruptly closed Tuesday afternoon after a fissure was discovered in a steel support beam. Inspections that night revealed a second cracked girder in the same area. Transbay officials are scrambling to brace the damaged area and inspect the beams to determine the extent of the problem.
Until then, expect the center, and Fremont Street where it passes beneath the building, to remain closed. Most buses that use the center have been diverted a block away to the Temporary Transbay Terminal, the regional transit hub while the new center was being built. But the closure of Fremont Street has tangled traffic on the already congested route from the freeway into the Financial District.