Bay Bridge blunders

Bay Bridge leaks: Toll payers on hook for Caltrans’ blunders

By Jaxon Van Derbeken

A Caltrans decision to scrap a drainage feature on the new Bay Bridge eastern span led to hundreds of leaks that threaten to spread corrosion through the landmark structure, documents reviewed by The Chronicle show.

The bill to toll payers: $1.4 million and counting. None of the solutions Caltrans has tried so far has completely stopped the leaking.

“What’s going on right now is not acceptable to us, and we’re going to fix it,” said Brian Maroney, the bridge project’s chief engineer, who said he had only recently learned about the change that eliminated a key element of the planned drainage system.

“We did expect some water and there’s a design to manage it, but clearly there were some changes and not all of us knew about it,” Maroney said. “But now it is in place and we’re going about fixing it.”

The leaks are just one of a series of construction problems for which Caltrans has taken the blame and transferred the cost to toll payers rather than trying to hold the bridge’s contractors accountable, according to documents obtained under the state Public Records Act.

Caltrans officials never provided a detailed explanation last year of what went wrong after 900 leaks developed in what were supposed to be watertight structures supporting the road decks on the $6.4 billion bridge. However, contract-change-order documents show that the root cause was Caltrans’ 2011 decision to abandon a piece of the drainage system for the westbound side of the span.

That system was intended to keep rainwater from pouring through the holes where the steel guardrail on the suspension span is attached to the road deck. On the westbound side of the span, the system relies on a 2-inch-high steel fence welded to the edge of the deck. That fence shunts water away from the guardrail, which has a small gap between the base and the roadway to enable it to absorb the impact of being hit by a car.

As a backup, the original bridge design included 1-inch-thick plates bolted to the deck behind the steel fence, to channel away any water that flowed over the 2-inch barrier.

But in 2010, the bridge’s main contractor, the joint venture American Bridge/Fluor, asked Caltrans if it could scrap the plates and fill in the holes that had already been drilled to attach them to the deck. The change would save time and money on a project already dogged by delays and cost overruns. In 2011, Caltrans agreed to the change.

“It’s too bad some people at Caltrans don’t or didn’t own sailboats in the bay,” said Bob Bea, a civil engineering professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who has studied what goes wrong on infrastructure projects. “What I’ve learned after 15 years with that boat is, if it can leak, it will leak.”

Bill Casey, the resident engineer on the project, told The Chronicle that one advantage with doing away with the backup plates was that fewer holes would be drilled in the deck, meaning there would be fewer places for the span to leak.

The problem, he said, was that Caltrans failed to make sure the guardrails were thoroughly sealed to make up for the absence of the plates. “We just weren’t complete,” he said.

The decision and lack of follow-through proved disastrous after the bridge opened. Rainwater poured through the gap at the base of the guardrails and down into the holes where the barriers are attached to the road deck, into the cavernous steel support structures that are supposed to be watertight.

Experts who have reviewed photographs and other evidence say there are signs of corrosion in the chambers where, among other things, the main cable for the suspension span is anchored. Photos also show apparent corrosion in pools of water under the deck.

Caltrans officials have denied there is any active corrosion on the span, saying the brown sludge and white powdery residue shown in photos are signs of corrosion on steel shavings left behind from construction.

Early last year, after The Chronicle reported that leaks on the span posed a corrosion danger, Caltrans officials promised to get to the bottom of what happened.

In an April 2014 accounting, Caltrans said only that its decision to abandon the drainage plates was part of a package of measures to “simplify fabrication and erection work.”

In accepting blame for the problem that caused the leaks, Caltrans acknowledged in the memorandum that without the drainage plates, storm water would “no longer (be) channeled away and out of the barrier,” and would pool in unprotected areas and inevitably flow into the vulnerable steel structures.

As a result, Caltrans agreed to pay $400,000 in toll payers’ money to American Bridge/Fluor to try to keep the water out. Soon after, Caltrans threw in another $750,000 payment.

The money paid for caulking the interior of the guardrail and installing a rubber seal to try to keep water from flowing over the 2-inch diverter fence.

However, the fixes were not watertight when rains returned in earnest in December, bridge officials acknowledged. They say the leaks aren’t as bad as last winter, but that water is still dripping into the chambers.

“There is a difference between 'some’ water and this (much) water,” said Maroney, the chief bridge engineer. “When it rains, water is not supposed to get in there like that, so we’ve got to fix it.”

Maroney said he hadn’t made the decision to scrap the drainage plates, and in fact had learned of it only recently.

Caltrans has asked the bridge design firm T.Y. Lin International to come up with a way to prevent water from entering the deck structures once and for all. There is no cost estimate for the work.

Lisa Fulton, a Berkeley corrosion expert, has analyzed samples of what she says are traces of corrosion found inside the span. “As long there’s water, there will be corrosion and the increased risk of cracking,” she said.

“They go to all this trouble to develop a system, and then don’t use it — it’s just one thing after another,” she said.

Meanwhile, the method Caltrans came up with to channel whatever water that did make its way into the steel deck sections has failed as well.

Caltrans officials admitted they never told the company that built the sections that holes in reinforcement ribs were intended for drainage. As a result, the contractor filled many of them with caulk.

The result was pools of standing water in vital sections of the structure. Caltrans agreed to spend $300,000 to bore out the plugged drainage holes and plug other potential leak spots.

Casey said the problem was the agency’s fault. “We did not tell the fabricator not to caulk them in place. So we paid to dig them out.”

It’s not the bridge’s only water-related problem. Officials are struggling with more than 60 high-strength steel rods holding down the bridge tower that became flooded because they were not well-protected with grout. Tests on one of them revealed rust and tiny cracks, corrosion damage that could lead to their sudden failure.

Caltrans took responsibility for that problem as well, paying the contractor $80,000 to drain water from the rods’ sleeves and clean out the debris from the area.

Toll payers have picked up the tab for other problems, documents show, including the cost of dealing with paint problems that have now topped $4.5 million and a $2.4 million fix for sliding maintenance platforms beneath the bridge that didn’t work.