The new Carquinez Bridge suspension span taking shape at the right will open in October, replacing the center span to carry westbound traffic on Interstate 80. Sacramento Bee/Michael A. Jones

A bridge so near

By October, a new span will be ready for traffic over the Carquinez Straits

By Matthew Barrows -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Thursday, April 17, 2003

Ask Dick McCabe how many steps it takes to get to the top of the new Carquinez Bridge and you get a quick response.

"Exactly too many," quips McCabe, 39, a third-generation ironworker.

During a 2 1/2-month span last year when the massive bridge cables were being spun, he says he made the trek up the steep, wobbly, spaghetti-thin-wire mesh catwalk at least once a day and as many as three times daily.

"You would think it gets easier each time, right?" McCabe says from behind a pair of wrap-around sunglasses, the San Pablo Bay his backdrop. "Lemme tell ya, it never gets any easier. That's the thing."

But from their 430-foot-high perch, McCabe and his mates have the perfect vantage point from which to view the final -- and most delicate -- phase of the building process: hoisting the 600-ton bridge decks up from the wind-whipped Carquinez Straits and locking them into place.

Just three of the 24 decks have yet to be erected, and the process is set to wrap up in two weeks. Then only finishing touches -- adding the roadbed and painting, for example -- will be left before the bridge opens in late October.

The bridge will have three regular traffic lanes, one car-pool lane, two 10-foot-wide shoulders and a lane for bicycles and pedestrians.

Like the Bay Bridge, it will have a necklace of lights that highlight the red suspension cables at night, as well as lights that illuminate the two white towers.

The new span will handle westbound Interstate 80 traffic, while the 1958 cantilever span to the east will continue to accommodate eastbound traffic.

The rickety, pothole-marked 1927 span in between will be torn down. The entire cost of the project, including new interchanges and demolition, is $480 million. The state project is part of an effort to make Bay Area bridges earthquake proof.

The first suspension bridge built in the United States since Richard Nixon was in the White House, the Carquinez span is marked by staggering statistics.

The piles for the two concrete towers are driven 300 feet into the muck and mud below the straits to secure the bridge in case of an earthquake.

Building the towers required a more than 400-foot-tall floating crane, the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

And if you untangled the wires that were spun for the two main cables, they would stretch nearly 13,000 miles -- about the distance from Sacramento to Shanghai and back again.

But lately the rare deck erection process has drawn the most oohs and aahs.

On the south end of the bridge in the town of Crockett, crowds have gathered on the piers as if they were watching a regatta on the bay. And engineers from as far away as Ireland, Japan and Korea have flown in to view the technique.

"We haven't built a suspension bridge in this country in over 30 years," said state Department of Transportation spokesman Bart Ney. "It's drawn a lot of interest."

The decking process, Ney said, actually began in Nagoya, Japan, where the steel decks were built. From there, they were loaded, eight at a time, on Chinese transport ships that crossed the Pacific in three weeks.

It's when the ships are positioned beneath the bridge that the operation gets tricky.

While a deck is being raised from the ship, Ney said, workers can afford only a meter of movement. A small fleet of tugboats is needed to battle the straits' fierce current and keep the transport ship in place.

The operation also must be done on a rising tide so that the cables holding the deck aren't overloaded.

The actual lifting is performed by big rust-colored devices called strand jacks that are fastened to the four corners of the decks.

Steel cables are hung from the bridge's main cables to the jacks, which slowly spool the cable and lift the decks. Once aligned, the decks are locked together as if they were giant Lego pieces.

Back at his office, Ney shows time-lapse footage of a deck section being raised in about 20 seconds. The real process takes four hours, so slow that a casual observer wouldn't even notice the decks are moving.

When all 24 segments are in place, crews will weld them together into one nearly mile-long piece of steel.

"That way when you go over it, you won't hear that thump, thump, thump as you drive over the sections," Ney said.

Since construction began in January 2000, the bridge crews have worked through all types of weather, including rain and fog. About the only thing that will halt the process is high winds.

To drive home the point, McCabe walks into a small cabin on top of one of the towers and points to a series of photographs on a bulletin board.

The pictures show a huge, green metal cabinet that has tipped over with several other pieces of equipment strewn about in the background.

The mess occurred one night, ironworkers gathered around the cabin say, when the winds atop the bridge gusted to 70 mph.

"When it blows like that," McCabe says, "you definitely don't want to be up here."

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	From a tower atop the new Carquinez Bridge span, Dick McCabe checks this week's progress on the project, the first suspension bridge to be built in the United States in more than 30 years. Last year, as the cables were being spun, the third-generation ironworker sometimes made the climb to the top three times a day. "Lemme tell ya," he said, "it never gets any easier." Sacramento Bee/Michael A. Jones