Slicing Up the Bay Bridge
by Claudine Zap
Our top picks from the day’s hottest searches.
- “Sex and the City 2″ (Searches increased by 1,576%). Be still our Carrie Bradshaw-beating hearts. “SATC 2″ is filming in NYC and the pics are rolling in.
- Pole dancing doll (+264%). A toy that teaches kids to strip. Cue outrage.
- Vanity Fair magazine (+166%). Levi Johnston, Bristol Palin’s baby daddy, dishes major dirt on the Palin fam for a magazine story hitting newsstands.
- Madonna and Lourdes (+101%). Madonna’s mini-me is featured in the pop star’s “Celebration” video to be released next week.
- Texas tenors (+83%). The singers made it to the top 20 of “America’s Got Talent.”
by Mike Krumboltz
Imagine the talent, machinery, and engineering intellect it requires to build a bridge. And not just any bridge, but one that carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day and has one of the longest spans in the world. Mind boggling, right? Now, imagine cutting a large chunk out of the bridge and replacing it with another huge piece that’s been earthquake-retrofitted. Still with us? Good, ’cause there’s a time limit. You have to do it all in about 90 hours.
We get a stomachache just thinking about it, but that’s exactly what some very motivated men and women are doing this weekend in the San Francisco Bay Area. The highly trafficked Bay Bridge, which runs between San Francisco and Oakland, will be shut down until Tuesday morning while an army of workers gets rid of the old span and brings in the new.
The extremely ambitious project has inspired a slew of searches. Lookups on “bay bridge closure,” “bay bridge info,” and “sf bay bridge” are all posting huge gains. The especially curious are looking up “how to build a bridge.”
We have no idea how to answer that question — a dog house is beyond our expertise. However, we can explain what the crew aims to do. A 300-foot section of the bridge will be sliced off and moved out of the way by humongous cranes. Then, a fancy, new section will be slid into place. A CBS station explains that the closure “is part of an overall replacement of the eastern span of the bridge, scheduled to be completed in 2013.”
If you want to follow along with the progress, the project’s official site features live webcams, pictures, interviews with the workers, and videos that show what the finished product will look like. Even to the most jaded commuter, this is pretty amazing stuff.
by Vera H-C Chan
Our picks from the day’s hottest searches.
- Space Shuttle Discovery (+1,164%). Landing during hurricane season? Good luck—astronauts have an extra day in orbit until they figure out which coast will be clearer.
- Hermaphrodite (+694%). The kerfuffle over runner Caster Semenya has people reading up this intersex condition; meanwhile, her government considers a lawsuit for human rights s.
- Cell Phone Radiation Chart (+417%). The Environmental Working Group’s consumer guide is hotter than a Billboard chart.
- 9/11 Pho (+274%). Commemorating today’s anniversary.
- Zozobra (+266%). Old Man Gloom—the original burning man—went up in flames at the annual Fiestas de Santa Fe in New Mexico.
