The city doesn’t know how to tell a story.
In January, I asked the city for documents related to the Del Rio Trail bicycle bridge across Interstate 5 and Riverside Boulevard.
You know the bridge.
It’s the $12 million span that never opened. The one with wooden construction forms still hanging above the freeway. Built with substandard concrete and rebar. Now facing demolition.
And begging questions about how the city waited until last summer, when the bridge was ready for its ribbon cutting, before anyone started screaming about the problems.
That bridge.
A month after making my public records request, the city responded with 1,898 pages of emails, maps and photos. I turned every page and learned a few things.
For instance, I learned city public works staff and bridge contractors had a $600 lunch at Hook and Ladder on S Street in January 2023. They called it a “partnering meeting” to celebrate the start of the bridge project.
I don’t know who paid the tip.
Being charitable, I’d say about seven of the 1,898 pages help explain how substandard concrete and rebar ended up in a bridge that spans California’s premier interstate.
There are many pages about drainage ditches on the Del Rio Trail and a street light erected in the wrong spot. There are pages about upcoming meetings, but nothing about what happened in those meetings.
Digesting 1,898 pages, I came away with three possibilities: The city doesn’t know how the bridge got built. The city knows but doesn’t want to admit it. The city knows but doesn’t want the public to know.
Of the seven helpful pages, one proves the city was worried about the bridge’s concrete even before it was poured.
The first bridge deck pour, scheduled May 18, 2023, was canceled because the city feared the weather was too warm. Apparently, concrete cracks when poured on hot days.
Another page indicates that by July 2023, after the deck was partly poured, the city realized there was trouble. Concrete core sample tests showed the mixture failed to meet Caltrans standards. The city suspended further pours.
What happened next is unclear. The city and its bridge contractor and concrete supplier—Mountain Methods of Sonora and Elite Ready Mix—spent the next six months debating whether the concrete is OK.
Mountain Methods and Elite wanted their own strength tests. There was talk about fly ash from different sources being commingled at uncontrolled ratios. Emails note bleed water and creep coefficient, thankfully not defined.
At one point, somebody from the contractor side mentions maybe changing the specifications.
By December 2023, it’s clear the concrete is bad. A Caltrans engineer with oversight responsibilities writes, “I recommend that the concrete should remain rejected and that the contractor should prove the material won’t cause a longterm durability issue.”
The Caltrans engineer says the bike bridge is expected to stand for 75 years. Then again, because it’s attached to a 50-year-old railroad bridge, he admits 75 might be optimistic.
Something else happened in December 2023. Contractors scanning for rebar in the bridge discovered the steel was a problem. Why substandard rebar wasn’t discovered earlier isn’t explained by my documents.
Nor is what happened between December 2023 and August 2024, when the bridge was set to open.
One document comes closest to telling the story, a June 2024 email from Tony Powers, senior engineer at Dokken Engineering, to Adam Randolph, city senior engineer.
It says the rebar “was placed too low,” or the concrete “slab was poured thicker than per plan, with the extra concrete on top. Indirect measurements of the slab thickness indicate that the latter is unlikely. In either case, this directly impacts either the loading or the capacity of the (bridge) and compounds any issues related to low concrete strength.”
Nothing else in 1,898 pages tells how the bridge got so screwed up. I guess the city forgot to redact that last email.
R.E. Graswich can be reached at regraswich@icloud.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
