SAN FRANCISCO — 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. The fixes failed Tuesday, injuring one person and damaging three cars.
High winds were hampering efforts to make repairs and reopen the bridge, which carries about 280,000 cars each day.
“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 today, 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 looked for alternatives to the bridge.
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.
“The repair they were doing was really a Band-Aid,” Astaneh-Asl said. “I think Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) is putting public relations ahead of public safety.”
