Don’t know that I feel any better knowing that “Dead Eye DIck” is his replacement.
That, or mosquitos.
Dang.
I’m staying off elevated freeways for a while. These things always happen in threes, don’tcha know. </tinfoil>
Well, you’ll be sorry when the third one happens, jinxing it and all.
Aaaaa! The stupid – it burns! It burrnnns us!
FUCK!!!
:mad: 
First the hurricane and then the fire at the refinery…How long til the oil companies use this as an excuse to raise their prices? 
This is San Francisco, people… heart of the dot-com boom, full of “think outside the box” types, spiritual home of LSD and the Merry Pranksters. You’re telling me that the wonderful people of San Francisco can’t figure out telecommuting? I understand that there are jobs that require your presence at the office. But I also understand that a lot of jobs that people say require a presence at the office don’t really require that much presence. Maybe an office that works with an east coast affiliate could switch to a red-shifted schedule, or offices tied to Asian capitals could blue-shift. Maybe you only need to be in the office for the Tuesday afternoon staff meeting; the rest of the week’s work could be accomplished at either off-peak hours or remotely, or both.
Now is the time to get it right. Think of it not as a major disruption, but as an opportunity to discover a new and better way to get the old work done.
Or at least inflatable freeways.
My commute to work today was surprisingly painless (both to and from work). NPR took notice of this this morning, and attributed it to the following reasons:
[ol]
[li]People taking a vacation day[/li][li]Telecommuting[/li][li]Mass transit operating free of charge[/li][/ol]
We’ll see how things are tomorrow, though.
LilShieste
Anyone else get a mental picture of Nick Barkley driving a buckboard filled with nitroglycerin?
Um, just me then?
crickets
I’m a bit nervous about tomorrow - the trip home this afternoon from SF to Concord with a stopover in Oakland was abnormally light, even for a “Friday Light.”
Everyone’s gotten home now and they’re telling their friends that the commute was a piece of cake and nothing to worry about, so everyone who tried telecommuting, tried out the free ride on BART or simply hid and took the day off is going to be back in their cars tomorrow.
Not just you. I’ve spent the last day thinking about a “wages of fear is kaboom” reference but I couldn’t get the wording just right.
In Michigan if you take down a utility pole ,you get a bill to replace it. I would not want to open his mail.
It may have been an offhand quip, but I heard someone saying something about they’ll probably bill him for the mashed guard rail.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like they have a mechanism for recovering costs of damaged road “accessories” like rails, light poles, signs and lane striping, but not to recover the costs of a destroyed road. There may be some definition of “property” involved - the stuff bolted to the road is property of Caltrans, but the road itself, being set into or very firmly anchored to the ground, is a different category. Just a WAG on that.
Nothing will ever convince the true believers, but this might help with those people who are wavering on the edge of belief.
Holy crap! I had no idea that a freeway could melt - that’s nutty. One thing I don’t get though:
Why indefinitely? The road is broken (well, melted). I would say that must be fairly high on the to do list - why can they not come up with a time line? Surely they have contingency plans for major road damage like this?
The stumbing block at the moment is steel.
They’ve got no shortage of crews and equipment - the demolition of the broken road was done so quickly because there was a heavy construction crew a couple miles away working on the new east span of the Bay Bridge, so it was almost trivial to bring them in.
The steel framework, however, is all custom-made to high specs, and nobody’s going to have the ready-made parts laying around in a warehouse. So, the appropriate grade of steel must be procured. There’s a local shortage of steel, so they’ll probably wind up having the girders and beams made in Vancouver or China.
I think with the debacle that is the “new & improved” Bay Bridge (still not done, and Loma Prieta was in 1989), “Indefinitely” is safer and more digestible than something concrete that may prove to be pathetically optimistic a few months from now.
It is amazing what they can accomplish when they put their minds to it, though, so here’s hoping that it speeds along much quicker than any of us is currently expecting.
Is there any upside to this? I mean, since the interchange is pretty much fucked, can they just tear the whole thing down and build something that works a bit better? Or is it going to be patched back into shape as it was?