While the new Bay Bridge is finally functional, it stands more as a symbol of dysfunction than anything else. From the start it seemed born under a bad sign, down since it began to crawl—like, if it wasn’t for bad luck, it wouldn’t have no luck at all.
Posted on June 21, 2016 - 10:38am
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl has been portrayed as a Cassandra, but these days he merely seems prescient. The UC Berkeley engineering professor was one of the earliest and most vocal critics of the new Bay Bridge design. The self-supported span was inappropriate for a seismically active area, he said, insisting that what was needed was a more prosaic, anchored span fixed securely to the mainland and Treasure Island.
Posted on October 9, 2014 - 2:38pm
The new Bay Bridge has officially opened, but the bitter dispute between UC Berkeley engineers and transportation officials over the safety of the span is far from resolved.
Posted on September 5, 2013 - 4:14pm
As the Bay Area celebrates the opening of a new Bay Bridge—an eastern span that transportation officials are hailing as elegant and seismically secure—UC Berkeley engineers are expressing serious misgivings about whether the structure is safe. And at least one professor labels it far less stable than the old bridge.
Posted on August 28, 2013 - 10:37am
The problems keep piling up for CalTrans – and by extension, for anyone who will drive across the new Bay Bridge. The project has been dogged by controversy from the start, and concerns have reached the point that public safety seems very much in question.
Posted on June 24, 2013 - 12:05pm
View the rest of the photos here
When I first got to know Joe Blum nearly 40 years ago, he was a union boilermaker working as a shipfitter and welder in the fabrication shops and shipyards of the Bay Area. Joe was a single dad and a workingman. He had dropped out of grad school at Berkeley to enlist in the progressive politics of the day, making common cause with his union mates. He hadn’t yet taken up photography in a serious way.
