The Bay Bridge Project

If you live in the Bay Area, you have no doubt been reminded countless number of times in the past few weeks — on radio, television, road signs and bill board etc — that the Bay Bridge is closed over the Labor Day weekend. For a long time I was under the impression that the closure was for some routine maintainance. But when I found out about the actual reason for the closure, I was intrigued. The more I learnt about the Bay Bridge, and this project, I was more and more impressed by the sheer amount of engineering involved in the whole enterprise.

The Transbay blog has a great post on the closure. Of course, baybridgeinfo.org is the go-to site for the all things Bay Bridge related, including live construction cams, videos and a lot lot more.

Here is some trivia about the Bay Bridge:

• It is the first construction project to be showed in Google Earth.
• The tunnel through Yerba Buena Island is the largest bore tunnel in the world: 76-feet wide x 58-feet high.
• Depth of deepest pier on existing East Span—the deepest pier of its time!: 242 feet—70 feet water and 170 feet mud.
• Amount of wire: 18,500 tons
• Amount of paint: 200,000 gallons
• Daily average number of vehicles that use the Bay Bridge: 280,000