Twenty years after the quake, how green is the bridge retrofit?
Tony Anziano’s office is in a trailer just off West Grand Avenue near the Bay Bridge toll plaza. An unmanned guard station squats in the middle of the lot entrance where white trucks with orange stripes come and go, kicking up small puffs of dirt. To an outsider, the mix of buildings and trailers, concrete and dirt, give the place an appearance of indecision, as though this Caltrans field office is teetering between being a temporary command center and settling in for a long, hard slog.
On the inside, Anziano’s office is simple: a few chairs and a desk engulfed by large binders, books and thousands of sheets of paper. He is the Toll Bridge Program Manager for Caltrans and oversees a significant portion of the Bay Bridge retrofit now in its eleventh year. Because of the construction’s location in the heart of major migration routes for birds, fish and marine mammals, the retrofit has raised a host of environmental questions, many of which remain unanswered today.
Twenty years ago this week, the Loma Prieta earthquake pancaked a section of the Bay Bridge, killing a motorist and launching the long, and often troubled, retrofit project. The first decade saw so much squabbling between Bay Area cities, the state and the Navy over design, features, location and cost of the new eastern span that the White House facilitated negotiations in 1999 to break through the stalemate.
The retrofit’s environmental review process wasn’t much easier. The final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was released in May 2001 after four years of consultation and struggle between Caltrans and regulatory agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), the California Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the SF Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We touch on everything,” Anziano says, “which is why we are probably the most regulated entity in the country.”
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