Page 171 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

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PAVING
PAVING THE ROADS THAT CARRY AMERICA
It was October 17, 1989 and Game 3 of the World Series between the Oakland A’s and the SF Giants was just about to start. Minutes before the first pitch, the ground at Candlestick Park began to shake. Twenty seconds felt like a lifetime. People stood wide-eyed and trembling, wondering if this was the Big One.
The 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake was the largest to hit the San Andreas Fault since the devastating San Fran- cisco quake of 1906 and created havoc all around the Bay Area. Anyone living here at the time remembers the image of a car hanging on a collapsed section of the upper deck of the Bay Bridge. And the desperate face of the one survivor trapped inside his car, pancaked between a double-decker portion of I-880 in Oakland. Forty-two motorists died in that concrete nightmare, including, a month later, that lone survivor seen peering out of his crushed car on that fateful day. It was a big wake-up call for Californians, especially the half-million commuters who cross the Bay Bridge every day. And while the San Francisco side of the bridge fared better because of its suspension design, the damage to the Oakland side grabbed everyone’s attention immediately.
Since then, Caltrans and private enterprise have completed numerous retrofit projects on high-rises, hospitals, freeways, and bridges all around the San Francisco Bay Area. Yet nothing epitomizes living in an earthquake zone quite like the seismic project of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Contractors spent eleven years completely rebuilding the two-mile eastern portion of the bridge.The price tag came in just under $6.5 billion.
O.C. Jones & Sons (OCJ) paved the last section of the bridge over Labor Day weekend 2013. They had al- ready paved the new suspension portion on the Oakland side that July, using a special epoxy asphalt concrete (EAC). The steel deck of the new self-anchored suspension bridge required something beyond the usual hot- mix asphalt used on the rest of the structure. “This was a very unique project for us,” recalls Kelly Kolander, president/CEO of OCJ at the time. “We used the epoxy asphalt on top of the steel plates because it holds
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