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SKIERNIEWICE, Poland -- Chinese companies have wowed the world with superhighways, high-speed trains and snazzy airports, all built seemingly overnight. Yet a modest highway through Polish potato fields proved to be too much for one of China's biggest builders. The A2 highway between Warsaw and Berlin was supposed to be an opportunity for Chinese construction to shine on a European stage after years of megaprojects at home and in the developing world. Poland badly wanted the project completed before the European soccer championships starting June 8, which Poland is hosting for the first time with Ukraine. Instead, a key 30-mile...

Oakland -- For the first time since the design of the new east span of the Bay Bridge was selected in 1998, it no longer takes a healthy imagination or a look at artist renderings or models to visualize what it will look like. On Monday night, catwalk lights were switched on at 7:45, giving the Bay Area a preview of the bridge's after-dark appearance when it opens in 2013. A little more than a week ago, construction crews finished hanging orange catwalks that trace the path that the single-tower suspension span's mile-long main cable will follow. Construction of the...

MDTA Hurricane Update -- Saturday, Aug. 27 -- 7:45 p.m. BAY BRIDGE CLOSED; Nice/Key/Hatem/Tydings bridges in Wind Warnings The Bay Bridge (US 50/301) was closed at approximately 7:35 p.m. today as a result of severe winds and unsafe driving conditions due to Hurricane Irene. The bridge is experiencing sustained winds of more than 62 mph and wind gusts of 72-80 mph and will remain closed until conditions are deemed safe for vehicles to cross. MDTA's four additional bridges including the Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge (US 301), the Francis Scott Key Bridge (I-695), the Tydings Memorial Bridge (I-95) and the...

Wow!Same photo here. It takes a short to load the above page. http://imgs.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/inberkeley/2011/03/11/Tsunami600x336.jpg

A man who claims to have pipe bombs is threatening to jump off the Bay Bridge. A female got out of the car and said there are five bombs in the vehicle. All westbound traffic is being stopped at the toll plaza.

President Kennedy made one of his greatest speeches in Berlin. Some debate whether his German intonation was perfect -- "Ich bin ein Berliner" -- but the speech's venue certainly was perfect. Kennedy wanted a side-by-side comparison of limited government versus authoritarian government, and there was no better place to do that than in the artificially divided German city. The speech also employed powerful repetition: "Let them come to Berlin!" Today, there are those who say that America has become more like the dysfunctional, oppressed East Berlin of 1963 than its efficient, free contemporary to the West. New York Times columnist...

With much fanfare and celebration - by Chinese steelworkers and Caltrans officials alike - the first steel pieces of the new Bay Bridge suspension span were prepared to ship out of Shanghai on Tuesday - more than a year late but in time to meet a Dec. 31 deadline that officials hope will keep construction on schedule for a 2013 opening. "It's momentous," said Ken Terpstra, Caltrans' project manager for the Bay Bridge, from Shanghai where workers staged a ceremony complete with daytime fireworks. "It was a hard, challenging road, but they're ready to go." The first shipment, delayed by...

OAKLAND -- KTVU News has learned a key section of that bridge has been delayed again and Caltrans now is bracing for a new cost over-run in the tens of millions of dollars. The history of the new Bay Bridge has been a troubled one from the time the state decided to replace the old eastern span after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The original price tag of a little more than $1 billion has exploded into more than $6 billion along with numerous delays. Now Channel 2 News has learned that next Wednesday, state and local transportation officials are...

<p>A truck driver died early today after losing control on the Bay Bridge S-curve at high speed and plummeting 200 feet below to Yerba Buena Island, the most serious collision yet since the new detour was installed, the California Highway Patrol said.</p>

The Bay Bridge reopened just after 9 a.m. today, six days after a repair job on a cracked structural beam on the eastern span fell apart and plunged onto the upper deck. Tests conducted overnight and this morning on an altered version of that repair job showed that the fix was holding, Caltrans spokesman Bart Ney said. At 9:01 a.m., a fleet of five California Highway Patrol cars escorted the first private vehicles allowed onto the westbound upper deck since the span was shut down Tuesday evening. About 10 minutes later, the lower deck reopened for traffic heading to the...

And They Want to Be Our Health Care Providers http://www.wiseandfrugalgovernment.blogspot.com In 2002, Caltrans (California Department of Transportation ) began the construction of a new eastern span of the Bay Bridge. The estimated cost was $1.3 billion dollars. The plan? To rebuild rather than retrofit the span after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 caused a section of the bridge to collapse. After a series of delays and cost overruns the bridge is now expected to be complete in 2013 at a total cost to taxpayers of $6.3 billion. Just $5 billion or 384% over budget. That was before the break...

Authorities said they are shutting down the Bay Bridge in both directions after pieces of the cantilever section fell during the late-afternoon commute, striking three vehicles on the upper deck, the California Highway Patrol said. Caltrans officials said the parts that fell were two high-strength rods and a saddle that were part of the emergency repair that delayed the opening of the bridge on Labor Day weekend.

Hundreds of thousands of Bay Area commuters remain in limbo today as crews scramble to complete an emergency repair to the workhorse Bay Bridge. The 73-year-old bridge, crossed by more than 260,000 cars and trucks a day, was shut down for a larger, unrelated seismic upgrade project. Now, crews are working to fix a cracked steel link, called an eyebar, that helps hold up the east span. Inspectors discovered the problem Saturday afternoon, setting in motion a dash to fix a problem that - by itself - would have forced officials to shut down the bridge. "There's a lot of...

The speed and size of the tractor-trailer involved in the fatal, weekend crash on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge caused a jersey wall to break and allow the truck to plunge into the shallow water below, Maryland officials said Monday. Geoffrey Kolberg, chief engineer for the Maryland Transportation Authority (MTA), said the eastbound span of the bridge, on which the accident took place, is safe despite damage to 8 feet of wall along the right lane and that no structural damage occurred. Mr. Kolberg also said that the Mountaire Farms truck, which was carrying frozen chicken, was traveling westbound when an...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A 920-foot container ship, heading out of the San Francisco Bay from the Port Of Oakland, collided with a supporting tower of the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge early Wednesday, damaging its hull but it was not known if it caused any damage to the vital traffic artery. The collision happened at about 8:15 a.m. during the morning commute but did not disrupt traffic on the bridge.

Conspiracy: Unless the feds had something to do with it, the theory held by Rosie and others that the Twin Towers were brought down by the Bush administration just crashed and burned on a California freeway. In recent discussions on the jaundiced "View" and her Web site, conspiracy theorist Rosie O'Donnell opined that the 9/11 collapse of the Twin Towers, as well as 7 World Trade Center, marked "the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel." This, she said, is "physically impossible." Well, not exactly. Fire only has to weaken a structure already weakened by, say, a...

IF YOU'VE turned on your TV or radio this week, you've heard the question: How could a man with James Mosqueda's criminal record possibly have been approved to haul 8,600 gallons of explosive gasoline? There ought to be a law, some say, to ensure that never again will there be a gasoline-fueled fire that melts down part of the MacArthur Maze -- and, they suggest, this never would have happened if the "hazmat driver" did not have a criminal record. In Mosqueda's case, he has a serious criminal history. The tanker truck driver was convicted of a number of crimes,...

California Highway Patrol investigators are looking into whether a vehicle fire in the Macarthur Maze just before midnight Saturday was in any way connected to the disastrous gasoline tanker wreck that happened at the same spot just four hours later, destroying part of the interchange. The tanker truck crashed at 3:41 a.m. Sunday on the raised, two-lane connector from westbound Interstate 80 to southbound Interstate 880. Authorities have said the driver, who appears to have been moving at an unsafe speed in a 50 mph zone, hit the right guard rail, causing his fully loaded truck to overturn and burst...

SAN FRANCISCO - The experts paid to worry about disasters and terrorism have for years warned of collapsing highway bridges and exploding tanker trucks. They just never foresaw one event that would encompass both. Nonsense Local, state and federal government officials have "war gamed" a failed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge again and again, most recently in November, when a statewide exercise envisioned a 7.9-magnitude earthquake bringing down part of the span. The drills proved useful in responding to Sunday's wreck in which a tanker truck struck a guardrail, overturned and burst into flames, taking down a critical overpass. To some...

The driver who crashed a tanker loaded with gasoline and brought down a heavily trafficked highway overpass was given a commercial trucker's license despite a history of criminal convictions, including drug and burglary arrests. James Mosqueda, 51, of Woodland also got a special hazardous materials endorsement last year from the federal Transportation Security Administration. To get it, he had to undergo an FBI criminal history check and an intelligence background check. "It's reprehensible," said Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara, who chairs both the Assembly Transportation Committee and the Joint Committee on Emergency Services and Homeland Security. "Someone with that record...