by Larry Henry
VNS contributing columnist

I am very happy to learn that our Democratic Party leaders such as Pres. Obama, Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Jerry Brown truly realize the need to upgrade our infrastructures which are deteriorating from age. However...

Andrew Carnegie and Henry Bessemer must be turning over in their graves. When I was young, Pittsburgh, PA was known as "the Steel City" for its many bridges and former steel manufacturing base. Birmingham, AL was the "Pittsburgh of the South". I hope that by the time each of you finish reading this, your blood is, boiling.

Due to "clean air" fanatics, beginning in the late 1980s, the city shifted its economic base to education, tourism, and services, largely based on healthcare/medicine, finance and high technology such as robotics. The downturn of the steel industry left no steel mills within the City of Pittsburgh and only two remaining mills in the county. Although Pittsburgh successfully shifted the focus of its economy and remained a viable city, the city's population never rebounded to its industrial-era highs. While 680,000 people lived in the city proper in 1950, the population diminished to just 330,000 in the year 2000.

Birmingham, AL was founded in 1871. Most of the original settlers who founded Birmingham were of English ancestry. The city was planned as a place where cheap, non-unionized, and African-American labor from rural Alabama could be employed in the city's steel mills and blast furnaces, giving it a competitive advantage over industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast.

 

 

And look at what we are now dealing with

 

Rebuilding our infrastructure is a priority such as bridges and roads, per Pres. Obama. Obama said, "Help us put construction workers back to work". So why are cities hiring Chinese companies and workers instead of American companies and workers for building projects?



Workers at Shanghai Zhenhua finish the welding on a section of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. At a sprawling manufacturing complex here (Shanghai), hundreds of Chinese laborers are now completing work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Next month, the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field — will be loaded onto a huge ship and transported 6,500 miles to Oakland. There, they will be assembled to fit into the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge.

The project is part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer.

The assembly work in California, and the pouring of the concrete road surface, will be done by Americans. But construction of the bridge decks and the materials that went into them are a Made in China affair. California officials say the state saved hundreds of millions of dollars by turning to China.

“They’ve produced a pretty impressive bridge for us,” Tony Anziano, a program manager at the California Department of Transportation, said a few weeks ago. He was touring the 1.2-square-mile manufacturing site that the Chinese company created to do the bridge work. “Four years ago, there were just steel plates here and lots of orange groves.”

On the reputation of showcase projects like Beijing’s Olympic-size airport terminal and the mammoth hydroelectric Three Gorges Dam, Chinese companies have been hired to build copper mines in the Congo, high-speed rail lines in Brazil and huge apartment complexes in Saudi Arabia.

In New York City alone, Chinese companies have won contracts to help renovate the subway system, refurbish the Alexander Hamilton Bridge over the Harlem River and build a new Metro-North train platform near Yankee Stadium. As with the Bay Bridge, American union labor would carry out most of the work done on United States soil.

American steelworker unions have disparaged the Bay Bridge contract by accusing the state of California of sending good jobs overseas and settling for what they deride as poor-quality Chinese steel. Industry groups in the United States and other countries have raised questions about the safety and quality of Chinese workmanship on such projects. Indeed, China has had quality control problems ranging from tainted milk to poorly built schools.

But executives and officials who have awarded the various Chinese contracts say their audits have convinced them of the projects’ engineering integrity. And they note that with the full financial force of the Chinese government behind its infrastructure companies, the monumental scale of the work, and the prices bid, are hard for private industry elsewhere to beat.

The new Bay Bridge, expected to open to traffic in 2013, will replace a structure that has never been quite the same since the 1989 Bay Area earthquake. At $7.2 billion, it will be one of the most expensive structures ever built. But California officials estimate that they will save at least $400 million by having so much of the work done in China. (California issued bonds to finance the project, and will look to recoup the cost through tolls.)

California authorities say they had little choice but to rebuild major sections of the bridge, despite repairs made after the earthquake caused a section of the eastern span to collapse onto the lower deck. Seismic safety testing persuaded the state that much of the bridge needed to be overhauled and made more quake-resistant.

Eventually, the California Department of Transportation decided to revamp the western span of the bridge (which connects San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island) and replace the 2.2-mile eastern span (which links Yerba Buena to Oakland).

On the eastern span, officials decided to build a suspension bridge with a complex design. The span will have a single, 525-foot tower, anchored to bedrock and supported by a single, enormous steel-wire cable that threads through the suspension bridge.

“We wanted something strong and secure, but we also wanted something iconic,” said Bart Ney, a transportation department spokesman.

A joint venture between two American companies, American Bridge and Fluor Enterprises, won the prime contract for the project in early 2006. Their bid specified getting much of the fabricated steel from overseas, to save money.

California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the “Buy America” provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers.

China, the world’s biggest steel maker, was the front-runner, particularly because it has dominated bridge building for the last decade. Several years ago, Shanghai opened a 20-mile sea bridge; the country is now planning a much longer one near Hong Kong.

The selection of the state-owned Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Company was a surprise, though, because the company made port cranes and had no bridge building experience.

But California officials and executives at American Bridge said Zhenhua’s advantages included its huge steel fabrication facilities, its large low-cost work force and its solid finances. (The company even had its own port and ships.)

“I don’t think the U.S. fabrication industry could put a project like this together,” Brian A. Petersen, project director for the American Bridge/Fluor Enterprises joint venture, said in a telephone interview. “Most U.S. companies don’t have these types of warehouses, equipment or the cash flow. The Chinese load the ships, and it’s their ships that deliver to our piers.”

Despite the American union complaints, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, strongly backed the project and even visited Zhenhua’s plant last September, praising “the workers that are building our Bay Bridge.”

Zhenhua put 3,000 employees to work on the project: steel-cutters, welders, polishers and engineers. The company built the main bridge tower, which was shipped in mid-2009, and a total of 28 bridge decks — the massive triangular steel structures that will serve as the roadway platform.

Pan Zhongwang, a 55-year-old steel polisher, is a typical Zhenhua worker. He arrives at 7 a.m. and leaves at 11 p.m., often working seven days a week. He lives in a company dorm and earns about $12 a day.

“It used to be $9 a day, now it’s $12,” he said Wednesday morning, while polishing one of the decks for the new Bay Bridge. “Everything is getting more expensive. They should raise our pay.”

To ensure the bridge meets safety standards, 250 employees and consultants working for the state of California and American Bridge/Fluor also took up residence in Shanghai.

Asked about reports that some American labor groups had blocked bridge shipments from arriving in Oakland, Mr. Anziano dismissed those as confused.

“That was not about China,” he said. “It was a disagreement between unions about which had jurisdiction and who had the right to unload a shipment. That was resolved.”


Last fall, one of the eye-bars holding up the Bay Bridge cracked. Now we know why. A Caltrans analysis has shown that the problem was in the way the eye-bar was manufactured, said Bay Bridge spokesman Bart Ney on March 30th. And it wasn't a mistake - every eye-bar was made this way.

"They were all fabricated in accordance to a process established in the 1930s," said Tony Anziano, the full bridge program manager. That process creates a slight concavity on the outside edge of the eye-bar head, and the edges of that concavity form a thin edge. Anytime you have an outermost edge like that, it is susceptible to fatigue. (To understand this, imagine bending a piece of clay. It's clear that in any circular formation, stress accumulates in the outer edge, and that's where cracks start.)

Having that thin edge provided the opportunity for the crack to start, Anziano said, and it slowly worked it's way inward over the course of a little more than a year. To solve this problem, workers have ground down the edges of the eye-bars, and painted them with dye to reveal any microscopic cracks. The dye is orange, and if you've been noticing that every eye-bar head looks rusty as you drive over the bridge - that's not rust, but dye, according to Anziano.

The takeaway? This is a problem that seems to have been solved. Before people were being told that normal vibration caused the problem, and the implication was that it could cause a similar crack on any other eye-bar. And vibration is still thought to be key, but now that the analysis has revealed clearly that the manufactured ridge contributed, and now that those ridges have been eliminated, we can all breathe a little easier.

(I wonder where those eye-bars were made? The Answer)

For Additional information about failed structures in CA.

< Prev		Next >