Engineers: Bay Bridge woes show need for critical action

Oakland Bay Bridge when a piece of steel and a giant cable crashed down.

He was just 50 yards away. The iReporter was just far enough away that he didn't see the debris as it fell. But he did see cars quickly move to the right lanes to avoid the mess.

The falling debris forced the closure of the bridge and snarled traffic between Oakland and San Francisco, California, as commuters look for alternate ways to get to and from the cities.

It's also forcing structural engineers to look at key questions around the nation's infrastructure: Has the nation done enough to address crucial bridges two years after the tragic collapse of a bridge in Minnesota that killed 13 people?

The answer, experts say, is no.

The pieces that fell this week raise even more troubling issues because repairs had just been made in September to the same section of the 73-year-old bridge, which spans the San Francisco Bay and carries an average of 280,000 vehicles daily.

Over Labor Day weekend, crews worked to repair a damaged steel beam.

"The bridge has been inspected, and it is now safer than when we closed it," Randell Iwasaki, the director of the California Department of Transportation, said at the time.

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says he's concerned that authorities took a "Band-Aid" approach in September. "It failed," he said.