Bay Bridge Skyway Milestone

The controversial San Francisco Bay Bridge renovation has reached a milestone, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Crane operators slipped into place the last two pieces of the new Bay Bridge skyway on Thursday, fitting them together with 450 other concrete slices already in place.

Over the next year, construction workers will finish the eastern span's skyway, installing cables and epoxy to link the pre-cast segments together. They'll also pave the roadway and finish the steel deck that will support the bike path. The completed skyway will be 1.4 miles long.

The parallel viaducts will be used as a staging area for construction of the self-anchored, single-tower suspension span, which is expected to take the next six years to build.

The Chronicle notes that "engineers used lasers to measure the segments and verify that they were within one-eighth of an inch of specifications."

Those who rode out the 1986 Loma Prieta earthquake in Santa Cruz, 10 miles from the epicenter, may remember a garbled radio report announcing that "the Bay Bridge has collapsed" and conjuring visions of 1906-style devastation. While things were actually far worse across the bay in Oakland, one 50-foot section of the Bay Bridge had given way — dropping two cars to the lower deck, killing one person, and providing the wake-up call that led to the current $6.3 billion retrofit and reconstruction project.