The Bay Bridge’s troubled eastern span won’t open until December at the earliest.
The Bay Area Toll Authority’s executive director, Steve Heminger, said the authority is abandoning its goal of opening the new bridge by Labor Day. He said it will take several more months to install a steel saddle that will secure the span of the new bridge where bolts snapped in March. “You might look at it as our belt broke and we are putting on suspenders,” he told reporters. “And we need to get the suspenders fabricated and installed.”
Once the retrofitting is finished, Bay Bridge traffic will need to be shut down for four days to complete construction. The initial goal had been to complete that work over Labor Day weekend. The new mid-December time frame makes that work much more complicated, Heminger said, because of increased rainfall.
"We will have to work … with a really good meteorologist," he said, "so we try to pick a patch of dry weather to get the new east span open to traffic.”
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s press release warns that the final construction phase “may or may not coincide with a Monday holiday weekend and may involve shorter advance notice to the public than prior closures.”