San Francisco's Bay Bridge: Made in China

The old and the new

The 1989 earthquake put the San Francisco Bay Bridge in serious need of replacement. Constructions crews have been busy working on its replacement in hopes of completion before the next major quake. An major quake with an epicenter near San Francisco would spell an even larger disaster for the Bay Bridge.

With that said, details of the new Bay Bridge should anger all Americans. It comes with a huge price tag and a label that reads "Made in China."

As Americans are desperate for jobs, it turns out this span of federal Interstate highway should have been a shovel-ready job. However, parts of the bridge were outsourced to China.

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.

I wonder how much federal money was borrowed from China to fund this bridge, and how many of those borrowed dollars returned to the hands of the Chinese. My goodness, have we really become this stupid in America? Made in China bridges now?

It's not just San Francisco's Bay Bridge. There are a ton of other projects similar to it that have the Made in China label.

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.

California says it saved $400 million by outsourcing part of the $7.2 billion bridge to China. When it fails to the shotty standards that gave our dogs poisonous dog food and our children deadly toys with high lead content, then will they boast of their $400 million savings? Probably not.