A Bridge Over Troubled Water and Politics?
Commenter Fred Dobbs had much of this in the Open Thread, June 19th at 9:33AM. I highjacked it, added more up to date detail, and an opinion. I did find it interesting.
Somewhere there is a print(s) and BOM for this structure along with specifications (which were alluded to as BD vs BC steel) for materials along with a comparison of structural strength necessary. The Chinese did not build this on a whim.
And why Chinese steel and components?
Bay Bridge spokesperson Bart Ney disputed the accuracy of Paul’s claims and said 70 percent of the steel being used for the new span is fabricated in America. Ney said foreign companies are used out of necessity for some parts of the project.
“The primary contractor chose China to deliver those parts because the capacity is not here in the United States right now. There was no American fabricator that would build those specific parts of the bridge,”
Manufacturing Group Protests Chinese Steel Used in Bay Bridge Construction, KPIX CBS
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Bridge Comes to San Francisco With a Made-in-China Label
June 25, 2011
SHANGHAI — Talk about outsourcing. At a sprawling manufacturing complex here, hundreds of Chinese laborers are now completing work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
Next month, the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field — will be loaded onto a huge ship and transported 6,500 miles to Oakland. There, they will be assembled to fit into the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge.
The project is part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer. The assembly work in California, and the pouring of the concrete road surface, will be done by Americans. But construction of the bridge decks and the materials that went into them are a Made in China affair. California officials say the state saved hundreds of millions of dollars by turning to China.
Dang: The Chinese-Made Bay Bridge Continues to Fall Apart
April 7, 2015
The San Francisco Chronicle reports the bridge’s anchor rods may be snapping.
Good news for people who like bad news: There are serious problems with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
Again. From the San Francisco Chronicle comes the news that one of the anchor rods in the bridge’s eastern span may have snapped:
An ultrasonic test performed late last month indicates that the steel fastener may be as much as 6 inches shorter than the other rods, Caltrans officials say. It could have snapped at the bottom because of corrosion, or it could simply have been cut or made shorter than the other 400-plus rods at the tower’s base, they say.
The answer could determine whether Caltrans must bolster the tower’s anchoring system.
October 2, 2019
California Globe Still-faulty San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge span used Chinese steel
China’s totalitarian regime, a member of the World Trade Association since 2001, had more to celebrate when California opted to use Chinese steel on the new span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
That stylish structure came in 10 years late, $5 billion over budget, and riddled with safety issues that prompted Gov. Jerry Brown famously to quip, “I mean, look, shit happens.” Many of the problems, it turned out, stemmed from the use of Chinese steel.
In early 2014, State Sen. Mark DeSaulnier of the Transportation and Housing Committee held hearings on the troubled span. In 2013, dozens of the long metal rods on the project snapped and metallurgical engineer Lisa Thomas testified that this was due to hydrogen embrittlement. Caltrans invited this problem, Thomas testified, by opting to use Grade BD steel on the project, rather than the more robust Grade BC. Caltrans also outsourced work to China, where workers produced cracked welds.
Caltrans bridge engineer Douglas Coe noted that every one of the structure’s 750 panels had to be repaired. UC Berkeley structural engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asi, who knows a bit more about bridges than Jerry Brown, believes the structure is unsafe and declines to use it.
DeSaulnier, a Concord Democrat, cited “a deliberate and willful attempt to obfuscate what is happening to the public.” Caltrans geologist Michael Morgan testified that safety problems were kept secret, ignored and covered up. He called for a “criminal investigation,” but Attorney General Kamala Harris took no action.
you mention the possibility of corrosion.
when i had the job of assembling parts made a hundred miles from the job site.. i had taken over the job from the prior person during whose tenure those parts (reinforced concrete bridge beams about 135 feet long) came to the job site too long to fit in the space between the piers placed and constructed on-site. the problem was only a matter of an inch or so, so the construction workers just spalled off enough concrete from the ends of the beams to fit them in place. trouble is, that concrete was what protected the reinforcing steel from corrosion.
the problem was due to lack of enough care in measuring the length of the beams and setting the spaces between the piers. i made some changes in that level of care, and made myself unpopular by insisting that the surveyor’s mark meant “here” and not “as close to here as you can get to here without too much trouble”. after that no more beams were spalled.
but no one worried about the ones that had been spalled. as far as i know there has not been a problem so far.
moral to this story is that it might not be the chinese steel. but the American workers (contractors and workers, state project managers and inspectors) who do not understand when quality of workmanship matters, and American engineers who design great big things with tolerances too tight for predictable field conditions and “normal” quality of workmanship.
Under the heading of ‘unintended consequences’, one difficulty of yoooge infrastructure projects is securing the labor & materials to produce them. One solution is to buy them elsewhere and float them into place, which seems to be feasible for west coast projects especially. Is this a good ‘win-win’ solution?
Not necessarily.
Fred, not necessarily. we had a source for well made beams about a hundred miles away. 135 ft beams could be trucked in.
what we could not truck in was competent project mangers (state or private), or competent surveyors (state or private), or competent engineers (state or private). Now, they were all competent “enough” by modern management theory. But none of them considered their job to include making sure the measurements did what they needed to do.
I understand NASA has had this problme with manned space flights and Mars probes.
On a earlier, yooger, project we had a source for beam segments just downriver. Those could be barged to the bridge site. The bridge went from one state to another, so different private construction firms were hired for each states’s end of the project, and each state provided its own project managers. One side was neat and orderly…and only killed two workers. Our side was a mess and a danger to everyone, constantly. We didn’t kill anyone, but we did have some bad injuries. At about that time a whole bunch of people were killed somewhere when a balcony failed. I got in a lot of trouble when I tried to point out that our own inspection procedures were a little too casual considering what was at stake.
Which I mention only to show there is more to building a bridge than Chinese steel. (about which, there is this, i have a friend who works for a metalurical company. he said ( few years ago) that Chinese steel was not as good as American, but was getting better fast. And related to that, I had a college professor once tell me that every steel mill, however modern, had an “old Polack” to tell them the exact minute to make the pour. Since then American economic policy has been to make sure we don’t have any more old Polacks.)
You can be sure that the old Polack did not make nearly as much money as the CEO who laid him off.
As I recall, the new Bay Bridge was floated across the Pacific and then welded into place. Easy peezy? It was evidently not just a question of materials availability.
yeah, easy peasy. i wonder how they held those sections in place while they were welding them…allowing for the camber that comes out as new sections were added, not to say the concrete (?) decking. i would have loved to be the junior surveyor on that project. might have learned a thing or two.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/20/nation/graham-says-bipartisan-infrastructure-deal-has-taken-shape/?event=event25
Democrats: Republicans don’t want you to win. It’s that simple. They want no successes on your watch, and they certainly don’t want to participate in said victories.
And yet the reports keep pouring in of Democrats bending over backward and gutting their bills in a desperate effort to win Republican support.
It seems to me that this has all been a performance, a going through the motions, a checking of the boxes, so that Democrats could say that they tried, that they extended a hand but were rebuffed. Democrats always seem to want to win the moral advantage, to say that they played the game with honor. …
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/opinion/republicans-democrats-manchin-filibuster.html?smid=tw-share
Stop Hoping the GOP Will Play Ball
Infrastructure talks collide with Democrats’ goal to tax the rich
NY Times – June 21
In most years, the notion that Congress could pass a $1.2 trillion plan to fix the nation’s bridges, highways, tunnels and rail lines without raising taxes would be a politician’s dream, a vision of endless ribbon-cuttings with no angry cries of “tax and spend.”
But that pitch, by a group of senators negotiating a bipartisan infrastructure deal, is receiving a hostile reception from many Democrats who favor a package five times as large, to be paid for in part with at least $2.5 trillion in new taxes. It is not just a much larger economic package they want; they also see a rare opportunity to harness the political popularity of infrastructure spending to achieve their long-held policy goal of raising taxes on the rich.
For liberal Democrats in particular — including newcomers like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and more senior members like Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon — the tax side of the ledger is not a mere accounting exercise to pay for spending, but a critical policymaking tool unto itself.
“What we’re doing is generating revenue, but we are also making a major area of American government more fair, so people don’t feel they’ve been played while the rich person gets off scot-free,” said Mr. Wyden, the chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee.
Centrist senators who have been toiling to find a bipartisan infrastructure compromise have steered clear of tax increases, after Republicans made it clear they were unwilling to touch the vast tax cut they muscled through Congress in 2017. But leading Democrats — following President Biden’s own budget prescriptions — appear determined to move forward on an array of fronts to reshape the tax code as part of any major infrastructure effort.
For weeks now, Mr. Wyden’s committee has been drafting detailed tax policy changes targeting three major areas: corporations, the energy industry and individual taxpayers.
“Taxes need to be raised on corporations and need to be raised on that wealthiest of people who got a terrible, tremendous windfall from the Trump tax game,” said Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee. …
Fred
seems that way to me too.
but there is the fact that they don’t really have a majority…there is always some “centrist” out there who enables the R’s. can’t imagine they run as Democrats just to be there waiting for the the need to block the Democratic agenda.
on the other hand if the D’s played hardball like the R’s, pretty soon they’d be just like the R’s.
We still need to learn how to win elections.
We still need to learn how to win elections.
It could be that the Dem electorate, mainly in urban areas, needs to disperse to the hinterlands and make their presence felt (take their chances) at the polls there.