Source: https://www.eastbaytimes.com, November 9, 2018
By: Erin Baldassari
Testing of two cracked beams at the Salesforce Transit Center will extend into next week and the results could prompt further testing, officials said Thursday, pushing the estimated date for determining a cause of the failures to the end of the month or later.
Once a cause is determined, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, the public agency in charge of construction and maintenance of the facility, along with a peer review panel, will determine a permanent fix to shore the cracked beams and reopen the center, said Dennis Turchon, the authority’s senior construction manager.
The $2.2 billion transit center opened on Aug. 12, only to abruptly close six weeks later after workers discovered large cracks in two steel beams that straddle Fremont Street. The beams, which are on the center’s third floor, support the rooftop garden and bus deck.
Officials also closed the section of Fremont Street below the building until crews constructed a temporary fix that allowed the street to reopen last month. Bus riders are using the temporary terminal that had been in place during the center’s construction.
There’s still no estimate on when the center will reopen, a date that will be determined after officials determine a plan for repairs.
Turchon said crews completed a series of onsite tests of the beams before removing samples for testing in a laboratory to determine the steel’s strength and hardness.
“A very important element that we’ll find out very soon is those core samples,” Turchon said. “That is a very important element to weigh into the matrix of solutions.”
But, the authority’s board of directors on Thursday also called for a more thorough review of the entire facility, also by a peer review panel.
“Given that we found (these cracks) just by chance, it begs the question of what other things are in the building that we should be looking at,” said Ed Reiskin, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s director of transportation and a member of the authority’s board. “The emergence of the issue puts at stake the credibility of the entire project.”
The beams used American-made steel and were fabricated by a highly-regarded Stockton-based company, Herrick Corporation, which worked on the Transamerica Pyramid, 181 Fremont Street and the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.
Skanska USA, a subcontractor of Webcor-Obayashi that was responsible for overseeing the procurement of steel at the transit center, filed a lawsuit in May against the authority, alleging the authority mismanaged the project and provided documents that were flawed or incomplete, causing delays and resulting in extra work for which Skanksa was not reimbursed.
The center’s general contractor, Webcor-Obayashi, also filed a lawsuit in October seeking $150 million in damages, alleging similar complaints. A spokesperson for the contractor said they anticipate the two suits are just the first of “an avalanche of lawsuits” to come due to the early mismanagement of the center.
The authority’s board of directors fired its former executive director, Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan, in 2016 over concerns about major cost overruns and repeated delays. San Francisco’s Department of Public Works then took over the project.