Demolition of Original Bay Bridge East Span Begins in Earnest

There’s a certain poignancy to the fact that full-scale demolition of the original Bay Bridge East Span Bay Bridge started today, on the 77th anniversary of span’s opening on November 12, 1936. While prep work to carve the upper deck on the cantilever portion of the original span into manageable chunks has been ongoing for the last couple of weeks, it wasn’t until today that crews were ready to begin the actual lifting out of the first pieces of road deck.

The current demolition focuses on 1,400 feet of the upper roadway between the two peaks of the cantilever section. According to project spokesman Andrew Gordon, this phase will take six weeks, after which crews will cut the cantilever superstructure in half, and start to demolish the western half of the cantilever superstructure and the Yerba Buena Island detour (better know as the S Curve) that connected the old East Span to the Yerba Buena Island tunnel.

The goal is to get both the cantilever and S Curve out of the way by early 2015 so as to make way for completing the new East Span’s bicycle/pedestrian path, which now stops short of Yerba Buena Island. The $92 million contract for demolishing the initial portions of the old East Span will be followed by two additional contracts — to remove the road decks and piers east of the cantilever, and then to remove the underwater foundations along the old span’s footprint. A portion of the upper deck of the old span adjacent to the Oakland shoreline was removed earlier this year, during Labor Day weekend preparations for the opening of the replacement East Span. Demolition of the entire two-mile length of the old East Span is on track to be finished by end of 2016.

See also:

• Fact Sheet: Original East Span Demolition by the Numbers (PDF)