Piecemeal demolition of San Francisco bridge will take years
While the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge will open to traffic in September, the work needed to take down the old roadway is expected to take years.
Brad McCrea, regulatory director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, the state agency that oversees protection of the bay, said that building the new bridge will only be half the challenge. “Taking the old Bay Bridge down is as practically as big a project as putting the new one up,” he said.
Environmental restrictions mean the structure will have to be carefully taken apart in sections, in the reverse order that it was originally built.
“They have great documentation about how this old structure was built in the 1930s,” McCrea said. “So they will use the architectural drawings from the 30s, they’ll use all of the photographs they have from the 30s, and they’ll use that as a road map to un-doing what was done 75 years ago.”
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