Maze Collapse Update
Update: All Bay Area public transportation will be free tomorrow -- but does that means all public transportation, including MUNI and Caltrain and SamTrans? We think so, anyways.
People who drove to Oakland today despite the warnings not to reported very light traffic! You don't say!
Schwarzenegger is coming to tour the scene and do a press conference around 10:30 pm tonight.
Oakland FD used water and not foam to fight the fire because they didn't want the foam to run off and pollute the Bay. It took two hours to put out once the bridge collapsed.
The driver's in okay condition (burns on the face, neck, and hands) and was transferred from Oakland Kaiser to the SF St. Francis burn center. Don't you kind of wonder what route they took to get him across the bay? He has a valid driver's license, no previous record, and didn't appear to be under the influence of anything at the time of the accident. He was driving from a Benicia refinery to a gas station near the Oakland airport.
The last accident in that area was in Feb 1995, when a truck carrying liquid gas lost control while changing lanes, killing the driver, injuring 10 people, and causing an all-day traffic jam.
The heat of the explosion melted the steel girders and the bolts holding up the bridge, which caused the bridge to slide off and snap the retrofitting cables holding it in place. A preliminary estimate of damages is around $20 million, assuming the bottom level (where the truck exploded) doesn't need work too. Caltrans has already hired a demolition crew and is getting started on repairs. They're totally heroes.
Here's a profile of the driver, who is a father of four and says he's never going to drive again. This profile also notes that his company, Sabek, was involved in another major accident last June, where they spilled up to 4000 gallons of diesel fuel into the bay.
Previous updates after the jump.
The good hard-working folks over at the Chron's NWZCHK blog have found this YouTube footage of the maze fire this morning. There's already a mildly-entertaining conspiracy theory argument starting in the comments of the YouTube clip.
So where were we since we last updated? Well, nothing else seems to have collapsed or exploded around here, though we're still staggering from the detail in the Chron that witnesses saw the bridge melting in the 2000-degree fire like a piece of plastic. Horrifying.
Thank goodness no one died, and big ups to the CHP, for saying exactly the right thing in response: "A bridge is replaceable. A life is not."
Investigators are saying that it sounds like the driver was speeding and tried to make that curve on the W 80/S 880 underpass a little too fast, and slammed into the guard rail. They're looking into the skid marks, the guardrail, and debris (though the tanker itself has apparently melted).
Part of the problem was that the explosion was exactly at the weakest point of the bridge -- all the steel girders supporting the bridge are exposed in exactly that 80/880 interchange. Perhaps that's something that can be addressed in the repairs?
Schwarzenegger's putting repairs on a fast track, and there may be free BART and AC Transit tomorrow. They're saying the highway won't take as long to fix as it did in 1989, since the bridge damage is relatively isolated, and they may open 880 up before they finish the 580 overpass.
For tomorrow, BART will run longer trains, and more of them during peak hours. They do caution East Bay folks to expect that the BART parking lots will fill up pretty fast. There wasn't any problem today because BART was already running more trains because of the A's and GSW games tonight. Go Golden State!