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This couldn't come at a better time, and leave it to a snapped eastern span Bay Bridge cable to make us find this: Baynewser reported just two weeks back about a joint venture between McSweeney's and the Public Press to examine (in old school investigative journalist style) and report on the whole Bay Bridge fiasco. The project to build a new eastern span is 6 BILLION DOLLARS over budget and already ABOUT A DECADE LATE, and honestly, today's event should be enough to make everyone who uses this bridge majorly fucking furious. It wasn't even an earthquake and that wasn't even a suspension span!
The Public Press/McSweeney's non-profit project (which you can, and should, donate $4 to today here) is looking to fund the hiring of an independent investigative reporter, a structural engineering expert, and a line editor to produce a broadsheet newspaper piece on this very subject to be distributed nationwide. Think of it as your first step in remembering (and financially supporting) the need for good investigative journalism in moments when we're being fleeced and misinformed at our own peril.
Anyway THX. Sorry to get all righteous and whatever. But srsly. Donate.
UPDATE: It's been confirmed that this investigative piece will be published online, and it will be included in the McSweeney's Issue 33, the newspaper issue. The day it prints, November 13th, the McSweeney's folks will be out on the streets of SF selling copies.
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Cool idea! Now, we just need to send it Phil Bronstein to make him shut up about "bailing out the newspaper industry", the same news industry that hasn't bothered to get all old-school, investigative journalism on this.
"A" decade late? Try two decades.
So what will an investigative reporter and a structural engineer find out that Caltrans didn't?
The Bay Bridge - a Preposterous Boondoggle of Staggering Idiocy.
The idea looks great. Hopefully, the final item will be made available online, so it's not a fetish piece read only by a handful. (The spot.us site says it will be, but insiders are telling me a few nuts want it in print version only, which would be an embarrassment in addition to a grand failure of reporting.) I really hope their intent is to disperse information. That said, I look forward to the piece.
Hey Brock: It is going to be published online as well as in print.
McSweeney's wants to publish it in print for their Panaroma project (http://bit.ly/3uhSto) and they don't want to publish it on their website.
But: It is important to Spot.Us that anything we fund be made available online for free. So the Public Press is going to publish it online and McSweeney's will publish the print and distribute it throughout the Bay Area. Should be exciting!
Thanks for the vote of support. I am privy to some of the reporting that has happened already and it's great stuff.
The real question is why Metropolitan Transportation Commission executive director Steve Heminger -- who got a nice raise last week -- isn't serving a very, VERY long jail sentence for his commandingly large role in the unmitigated disaster of the Bay Bridge.
It isn't like this (well, the several times cost overrun, and the years of delay, and the fundamental and scary structural vulnerability of the compressed-load DECK(!!!!) of the new "signature" span bridge -- not this latest little structural Ping!) weren't predicted, and it's not as if Heminger didn't lie repeatedly about the budget and schedule, on the record, over several years.
http://www.oaklandbridge.com has some old stuff from nearly a decade ago on this Heminger-lead catastrophe. It's just scraping the surface of the iceberg of corruption, technical incompetence, and systematic public account defraudment which the MTC stands for.
Heminger also almost single-handedly controls (elected boards just do what they're told at MTC/BATA) three quarters of a million dollars PER DAY of Regional Measure 2 bridge tolls, which he uses to reward his friends (highway, BART and Central Subway contractors) and punish his enemies (bus riders) Nice work if you can get it.
Sacramento has been under pressure from SoCal to block funding for the new bridge for the 13 years I have lived here. Sure, that's fair.
FYI: They've been blocking funding for this since even right after the earthquake saying that since it was a Bay Area bridge only Bay Areans should pay for it.
Interestingly enough, the same logic didn't apply after the Northridge quake when the collapsed freeway needed to be repaired.
Thanks for the tip Jay, did my part and donated to what looks to be a good investigative project. Everyone should pitch in, even a few bucks, just to spite the Chronicle management/owners. Eventually they won't even be able to give that paper away!
T.E.
Thanks mucho for the contribution. It is most appreciated.
And you are right: If we all put in what we can - the burden is not too much on anyone (the cost of 1-4 toll crossings). And we are going through documents galore to try and find out what is happening.
Bay Bridge WTF?!?!?
i seem to recall but can't find a special that phil matier did on slick willie brown. he single handily cost us 10 years of delays over his proposed micro brew on treasure island. that caused us to miss a window on affordable steel and concrete. billions were wasted.
thank you willie!
I don't understand this sentence at all. Correct, this was not the result of an earthquake, and it did not happen on a suspension span. It did, however, happen on a very complicated and very old cantilever span that has been patched and needs replacing. It's upsetting that it hasn't been replaced yet. But bitching that "that wasn't even a suspension span" is a complete non-sequitir.
Donate? Stupid Dave Eggers has plenty of $$ to fund this.
I'm kinda curious about the degree of separation between the entity that decides that the bridge is safe to use and the entity that collects the tolls. I'm glad no one was seriously hurt from the falling pieces of the "repair job" 7 weeks ago.
Um, WTF? If this were on Fark it would be marked "OBVIOUS."
Jerry Brown (our once and future governor) wanted his beautiful tower style bridge ("self anchored suspension bridge") to provide a gateway to Oakland. He and Willie Brown got together to stop Caltrans from building a much simpler "skyway" design that, had it been chosen, would already be in service, seismically safe, and not subject to failed repairs and S-curve accidents. (Of course the S-curve would have been built and removed already.)
Here in the Chronicle is then-Mayor Brown's argument for a "more fitting bridge", ELEVEN YEARS AGO:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/1998/06/22/ED11087.DTL
Everybody knows this. McSweeney's might have tried using a little-known thing called Google (or Bing, if they're more of a Microsoft shop) instead of using this story as a way to get in front of the oh-so-important What Will Happen To Investigative Journalism?? story.
Can I have my $4?
I just saw a great report on PBS that takes the delays back to the republican govenor threatening to give us a boring bridge unless we paid for it, the rising price of steel, Willie Brown thinking that Clinton would gift Treasure Island to SF, and on and on and on...
..but i can't wait until it comes out in pretty packaging with a retro theme...
great find aj. how did the eastern span get to be so ugly in the first place?
Well said suckafree and aj. I kinda remember this.
Willie and Jerry BOTH held up construction for their own pet causes. If they hadn't slowed construction down, it would already be built, cheaper, and the old section would be long gone. No accountability for them, of course.
Well, there is an "accountability moment" for Jerry next year, in the Governor's election.
If this group hires Dr. Astaneh from Berkeley as their structural engineering expert, then their findings should be completely disregarded. Please link back to this comment when the report comes out, because I have a feeling that I'm going to be right about their choice.
your groundless ad hominem is a thing of beauty. buy yourself an extra bag of cheetos today.
just because i don't state my grounds, doesn't make it groundless.
but seriously. if, out of the thousands of practicing engineers in the bay area, and out of the hundred (slightly less) structural engineering professors between cal and stanford, they choose the one that an anonymous sfist poster singles out, then I'm probably right about something.
just because i don't state my grounds, doesn't make it groundless.
as far as any of us know at this point, yes, your ad hominem is groundless by definition. then again, you follow your retort with, "but seriously," so maybe that's all a joke.
and really, you should try reading the background links on this story, you might find some illuminating information. given your somewhat apparent knowledge of the SE community, however, one might think you have a conflict of interest in rendering an evenhanded opinion on the matter.
Do you have an axe to grind against Dr. Astaneh? What gives? And yeah, go buy yourself a bag of chips.
Unclear why you would pick this one name from your hat. But if you followed the link you would see that the expert they hired is Reporter Patricia Decker, who has a masters in structural engineering.
Donated, $5, great idea. And yes, maybe if the Chron did this sort of thing people might be motivated to subscribe. A major metro area without a major metro paper worth its salt. Sheesh.
Thank you Jerry Brown and Willie Brown for hopelessly delaying the construction of the new bridge for decades while beauty designs and cost over-runs are hammered out, costing 20x the original design. Thank you for not treating this unstable bridge as the emergency that it is. Thanks for playing Russian Rullet with the lives of the thousands of people at are on it at any one given moment so that Oakland can have its pretty little designer bridge.
roulette not rullet.
rullet: roulette played by someone with a mullet?
maybe he meant rillette, which in russian form would likely be an obscure variation left over from napoleon's invasion. never knew this food had a game associated with it, much less one that involved death.