TANKER CRASH COLLAPSES SECTION OF HIGHWAY NEAR SAN FRANCISCO-OAKLAND BAY BRIDGE
April 30th, 2007UPDATE: Schwarzenegger Delares State of Emergency
Any guesses on the indirect costs of this one?
Via: CBS News:
A stretch of highway near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed Sunday after a gasoline tanker crashed and burst into flames, a loss that officials said could leave freeways leading to one of the nation’s busiest spans in near paralysis at rush hour. Officials said traffic will be disrupted for weeks, if not months.
Flames shot 200 feet in the air and the heat was intense enough to melt part of the freeway and cause the collapse, but the truck’s driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns. No other injuries were reported in the 3:45 a.m. crash, which officials said could have been deadly had it occurred at a busier time.
…
Authorities said the damage could take months to repair, and that it would cause the worst disruption for Bay Area commuters since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged a section of the Bay Bridge itself.
Nearly 75,000 vehicles use the portion of the road every day. But because the accident occured where three highways converge, authorities said it could cause commuting problems for hundreds of thousands of people. State transportation officials said 280,000 commuters take the bridge into San Francisco each day.
On Sunday the collapse doubled the half-hour trip drivers normally face getting to and from San Francisco and the eastern suburbs _ even though many didn’t even attempt the trip because of the crash. Traffic appeared light on the bridge itself, but motorists looking to get on and off were backed up on both sides.
Transportation officials said they already had added trains to the Bay Area Rapid Transit light rail system that takes commuters across San Francisco Bay, and were urging people to telecommute if possible.
State officials said motorists who try to take alternate routes Monday instead of relying on public transportation would face nightmarish commutes.
The tanker carrying 8,600 gallons of gasoline ignited after crashing into a pylon on the interchange, which connects westbound lanes of Interstate 80 to southbound I-880, on the edge of downtown Oakland about half a mile from the Bay Bridge’s toll plaza.
A preliminary investigation indicated the driver may have been speeding on the curving road, Cross said.
Witnesses reported flames rising up to 200 feet into the air. Heat exceeded 2,750 degrees and caused the steel beams holding up the interchange from eastbound I-80 to eastbound Interstate 580 above to buckle and bolts holding the structure together to melt, leading to the collapse, California Department of Transportation director Will Kempton said.
The charred section of collapsed freeway was draped at a sharp angle onto the highway beneath, exposing a web of twisted metal beneath the concrete. Officials said that altogether a 250-yard portion of the upper roadway was damaged.
Who could have known 8,600 gallons of gasoline was so dangerous? I’m glad we don’t have these trucks in my city!
Think what could have happened if THE TERRORISTS got their hands on one! Actually it’d have been about the same.
The saddest post-9/11 news story I remember reading is that these truckers pulled double shifts without pay in order to ride shotgun for each other. They really wanted to secure the system any little way they could.
I really question the media use of “disaster” to describe the Oakland, CA freeway bridge collapse.
Surely, “disaster” is more appropriate to the New Orleans flooding after Katrina, than it is to a traffic accident that injures one person.
Property damage is extensive, but amounts to the loss of some gasoline, one truck, and less than 1/4 mile of freeway bridge. That’s not a disaster. That’s a long-term inconvenience.
why can’t we have rail services and get these trucks off the road. There was one of these same events in Tampa.
So, you going to have a rail-head to every gas station in the nation? These trucks are dangerous, a fact of life, and stay clear of each and every one. I have seen first hand what can happen when one goes up, and that was at MY gas station one evening due to a simple electrical spark caused by a static discharge. I nearly had a heart attack that night.
Don’t even use your cell phone when pumping your own gas, believe me! It’s not liquid gasoline that is the problem, it is the vapor that ignites. Quickly throw a lighted match into a gallon of gasoline and it will extinguish, but truck around an empty gas tanker, and it is a “time-bomb” just with all the vapor alone.
What is even more scary are the trucks carrying nuclear waste all over the country. Keep your eyes open, eventually you will see one.
My first reaction to this news was – how will this effect the 9/11 Demolition v. Collapse arguments?
Or?
A truck carrying 8,600 gallons of biodiesel crashes and local people came with buckets and containers, clearing and collecting the spilled vegetable oil product diesel in a few hours……
Using Rosie O’Donnell’s far-left logic, the government must have had a hand in this. It was likely the work of agents who planted explosives because we know fire cannot melt steel.
This was George Bush’s way of getting back at people who voted against him. I suspect he used extremist Christians who, according to O’Donnell, are just as bad as Muslim radicals.
The article is grossly inaccurate. The McArthur maze elevated concrete roadway is not a steel structure at all. There are no steel beams. This is a cheaply reinforced concrete roadbed sitting on top of concrete pillars. The heat stress cracked the concrete, which pulled down the rebar. As seen in the photos, the rebar did not melt. There is no molten steel present. The picture looks the same as the collapsed elevated roadway (Cypress Structure) that collapsed Oakland in the 1989 earthquake, killing about 150 people. These are crappy freeways. Thanks Caltrans.
This was most likely a random traffic accident, but the MSM is grossly distorting the reporting of the story to try to restore credibility to the absurd official lies about the obvious WTC demolitions.
I once saw a tanker truck explode on I-5 south of the grapevine, it was a helluva fire that peeled the paint on my car, but the tanker truck itself did not even melt.
Steel is made through blast furnaces. Ancient tool makers used fire to shape steel. That’s how swords are created.
To believe that someone used shaped charges to demolish the WTC suggests the following:
1) that a clandestine team of government agents knew ahead of time the aircraft were coming and where they would hit and either planted the explosives in advance or were able to climb through the burning debris and plant the charges. If you recall the videos, the buildings didn’t collapse from the bottom, but the top down. This was definitely a job for Spiderman;
2) the foregoing, subsumes the notion that the US government was either part of the conspiracy or actually convinced 19 Saudies to learn to fly aircraft to kill themselves and 3,000 Americans. This plot have included Usama bin Laden, who on more than one occasion took credit for planning and executing 9/11.
Which is it?
Why would Governor Arnold ask the Federal Government for money? Surely he knows that our country is broke. The source of the liability is the oil company. Make them pay — they won’t miss it!
Like Rosie said, “gas can not melt steel”. This was just a figment of our imagination. This really didn’t happen. If we all come together and OHMMMMMM, the bridge will look the way it always has. I bet George Bush had something to do with this……hmmmmmmmm?
This same exact incident happened on I-95 in Bridgeport, Connecticut 2 years ago.
It’s interesting to me how proponents of the official 9/11 “conspiracy theory” have already jumped all over this event, using it to “prove” the official version of events with regard to the collapsed buildings. Just this morning, I heard a gentleman call in to a “community talk” radio show, insisting that the recent bridge collapse amply demonstrates that fire CAN melt steel, etc., an event that clearly disproves them nutty “conspiracy theorists.” Of course, for people who focus completely on the buildings at the expense of the other 98% of government-incriminating 9/11 information, I guess that might be convincing enough. Who knows…
Why let the bomb run in the city ? It comes out sooner or later . The best result we got is no one dead .What we should after the accident ?
I thought Rosie said fire couldn’t melt steel…
Modern steels are nothing at all like that made in the past, even as recently as 1912 (Titanic). To attempt to compare the two is disingenuous at best, akin to comparing modern computers with an abacus or adding machine. Pick up a textbook on metallurgy.
Fleetman08: Your suppositions are naive and diversionary, and your argument is based on a false dichotomy. I’m not going to make a case for controlled demolition here because a) there are far more convincing ones for governmental complicity that are completely independent of structural collapse hypotheses, and b) it is off-topic.
Oh, and I totally agree with you: those fundamentalist Christians are good, life-respecting people and are completely unlike Islamist extremists in every way.
I live less than a mile from the site and I was woken up at 3:46 AM to use the bathroom (Prolly woke up fom the explosion) there were flames flying hundreds of feet into the air, and there was black smoke floating up and into the fog (which had a hard ceiling of around 500 feet) and drifting north towards Berkeley and Albany. Aywhay… not much of a n interesting eye witness acccount but I do find it EXTREMELY INTERESTING that the demolition company that demolished the old part of the bay bridge last fall was already hired by CALTRANS as of yesterday to demolish the remianing portion AND TO REBUILD IT(They’ve already begun drafting plans) . It is also amazing that it happened at 3:42 AM on a Sunday.
Could their be a less busy time on that interchange? Amazing that the driver walked away? Is that like the pilot of flight 11 waling away from the trade center? Probably not… but… still makes one wonder.. possibly 30 – 50 million dollars (my guestimate) will be AWARDED to a contracting company almost instantly with no investigation becase of the hurry to get traffic moving. Shit.. we stopped every flight in the country sfter 9/11 fo 3 days (Oh yeah… that was so NASA could perform world climate measuremnents just before the USA was to sign the Open Skies Treaty and begin mass chemtrail spraying over populated areas). I guess there is no need to investigate this because everyone KNOWS what happened.
http://tinyurl.com/37va9g
From San Francisco Chronicle:
THE MAZE MELTDOWN:
Caltrans acts fast, puts demolition crew to work on freeway
Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, April 30, 2007
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By noon, Caltrans had hired a demolition company to begin removing the melted and twisted freeway connection.
The agency has also started to design a replacement structure for the collapsed, 250-yard section.
…
“We’re moving very rapidly on this,” he said. “We want it to be as smooth as possible for motorists.”
Caltrans has invoked a special emergency process that allows it to hire contractors without the usual competitive bidding. It also allows the agency to bypass environmental studies and to offer bonuses if contractors complete the work quickly.
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Bay Bridge Demolition Last Fall:
http://tinyurl.com/2x57uw
Would someone tell Rosie O’donnell that it happen again. FIRE MELTS STEEL as it always has.
CORRECTION: In my previoous post I spoke of Bay Bridge Demolition LAST YEAR x-x-x it was THIS MONTH (I don’t drive much) it began March 31st 2007 (Last Month) and was scheduled to go 20 weeks but they JUST finished it.
Caltrans Continues Bay Bridge Demolition Work
Traffic Detoured In S.F.
Apr. 1 – KGO – Caltrans has begun major demolition work on another critical section of the Bay Bridge approach. The construction will close down a section of Second Street until Monday morning.
Caltrans will have to demolish and cart away 18,000 cubic tons of debris, enough to fill a football field to a depth of up to 10 feet. Piece by gigantic piece – Caltrans crews are demolishing the last of the old eastbound approach to the Bay Bridge.
Bart Ney, Caltrans: “Originally this project was planned to work over 20 weeks, but the community came together with us and they said they’d rather just get it all over with as soon as possible. So we have condensed that 20 weeks worth of work, into about two and a half to completely demolish all of this
In my first post(sorry it has extended to 3, don’t mean to waste virtual space), the tinyurl was redirected to a trading card user group on Google (I tested the url before posting it and it directed correctly to ->
http://www.baybridgeinfo.org/Display.aspx?ID=15 but has since changed. I’ve never seen a tinyurl change it’s link before. Sorry about that.
-eric
Both towers came down symmetrically, which would be impossible if the steel melted. It is known that tower 7 was a controlled demo, even tho’ the powers that be wanted it to look like a fire brought it down as well.
Sorry Fleetman, but our government organized 9/11.
As a frequent user of California’s infrastructure, I can safely assure you that it is in SHAMBLES.
Even the government website below confirms this observation. The state of emergency declaration includes the power to freeze all government contracts for road building until this is fixed.
How much to you want to bet the looters start selling off California’s highways?
http://gov.ca.gov/index.php?/issue/sgp-backpage/sgp-transportation
“The inadequacies of California’s current funding methods have contributed to the underinvestment in the state’s transportation network. Per-gallon taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel and truck weight fees are the dominant sources of funding for transportation system maintenance and expansion. While increasing vehicle efficiency over the years provides valuable energy and environmental benefits, declining revenues per vehicle mile traveled, coupled with inflation and skyrocketing construction costs, cause revenue sources to fall short of the state’s transportation system needs. Consequently, chronic underinvestment increases congestion and has resulted in California having some of the most distressed highway and road conditions in the United States.”
See the ROAD to RICHES for highway privatization:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_19/b4033001.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_top+story
“In the past year, banks and private investment firms have fallen in love with public infrastructure. They’re smitten by the rich cash flows that roads, bridges, airports, parking garages, and shipping ports generate—and the monopolistic advantages that keep those cash flows as steady as a beating heart. Firms are so enamored, in fact, that they’re beginning to consider infrastructure a brand new asset class in itself.”
Jeezus, apparently some angry, right wing group sent all their members here to defend the official 9/11 story with the exact same Rosie O’Donnell joke. That one must get lots of laughs at the Elks Lodge. Go home guys.
– Mike Lorenz
It’s a troll swarm.
Open comments are like a Ouija board. It attracts bad shit sometimes.
People are submitting crap that is so off topic that I’m just deleting some of it now.
How this thread became a controlled demolition vs. official crackpot myth thread is a mystery to me.
The desperation of the official story crowd is showing, I guess.
This accident brings new meaning to Life after the Oil (Tanker) Crash. 😉
Maybe this is a good way to test public transportation as well as the public’s response to life without ‘happy motoring’.
http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/
“How will the public trans in everyone else’s area hold up if the crisis continues? I know the trains here are already packed full during commuting times and there are only a few stops to choose from. The route follows along the southern tip of Lake Michigan and into Chicago. I’d have to drive at least 30 minutes to get to the nearest stop. They’ve been talking about expanding coverage so more people could take advantage of the system, but who knows if they’ll be able to do it now. ”
http://community.livejournal.com/worldwithoutoil/
http://www.429truth.com/
An almost identical tanker truck crashed, exploded, and destroyed a freeway ramp in downtown Houston, within 48 hours of the Bay Area crash.
Texas Freeway Tanker Explosion
Could the exact same thing happen twice, by accident, within just two days?
Maybe it was a test run. Or a coordinated plot to disrupt interstate commerce. If so, it certainly accomplished (yet again?) its goal of disrupting commercial ground transportation.
What’s more amazing is this entirely unexplained “coincidence†has gone virtually unreported by the mainstream media. All the pieces are there, but they’ll apparently only be put together by a coalition of the net roots. Take back your right to be informed — about safety, about homeland security, and especially about your government.
And for those of you who are still skeptical that the government is involved in these crashes…
This second crash occurred just three hours from Crawford, Texas.