Bay Bridge Bolts Similar To Banned Bolts

The new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has more than 1,200 bolts made from galvanized steel that is virtually identical to a high-strength alloy that a nationwide group of transportation officials banned for use on bridges because the bolts can crack, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Sunday.

The bolts are used to anchor structures designed to keep the bridge stable in an earthquake, band the main cables together, hold the cables down at the top of the tower and bind them to the road decks.

Caltrans said last week that it was testing 192 bolts on the bridge that are similar to 32 galvanized bolts that cracked when workers tightened them in March.

The failed bolts were among 96 supplied in 2008 by Ohio-based Dyson Corp., the same firm that delivered the batch of 192 bolts two years later, The Chronicle said. Documents examined by The Chronicle show that state has purchased 932 other fasteners for the bridge in the past five years that - like the failed bolts - were made of high-strength, galvanized steel.

"This is completely the wrong material for use in this application," Charles McMahon, emeritus professor of materials science at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Chronicle. "I have devoted decades of my career to studying this. This steel is almost guaranteed to give you cracking under these conditions."

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The Prof said:

so much adversity this state can't survive

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But how legitimate is Brown's claim? It's shaky, if one looks at the numbers and assumptions behind the rhetoric.

It assumes that the revenues in the budget are valid, but in fact no one knows whether increasing the marginal income tax rate on high-income taxpayers could lead them to either move from California or shelter their incomes, particularly capital gains, from the state's reach.

The budget also assumes that California's economy will continue a slow but steady recovery, thus increasing retail sales and personal incomes on which those revenues are based. But California's economic future is very cloudy.

It assumes, too, that Brown's fellow Democrats in the Legislature resist pressures from major constituent groups to rescind some of the cuts in health and welfare services, and that the courts can live with continued erosion of financing without imploding.

Even if Brown succeeds in balancing income and outgo during the 2013-14 fiscal year, however, the tens of billions of dollars in debt run up during the previous half-decade of deficits will continue to fester.

The state also faces an ever-mounting burden of servicing bonded debt that has built up over the last two decades – and he wants to increase that debt even more for a bullet-train system of dubious efficacy.

Finally, as Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor has pointed out, Brown's multiyear budget plan ignores ever-growing unfunded liabilities for retirees' pensions and health care.

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