San Francisco officials urged commuters to stay off the road as much as possible Wednesday, as repairs continued on a cracked beam that forced authorities to shut down the city’s brand new US$2.2-billion transit terminal.
Workers discovered the crack in a steel support beam under the Salesforce Transit Center‘s rooftop garden Tuesday morning. Authorities decided to shut the key transit hub down at 5 p.m., just as San Francisco’s rush hour began.
Coined the “Grand Central of the West,” the Salesforce Transit Center opened in August near the heart of downtown after nearly a decade of construction. It was expected to accommodate 100,000 passengers each weekday, and up to 45 million people a year.
Engineers spent Tuesday inspecting the damage before recommending the centre be shut down for repairs, according to Mark Zabaneh, executive director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority that operates the centre.
“The beam is cracked,” Zabaneh said.
“The behaviour of the beam is unpredictable.”
Zabaneh said the crack was found near a weld on a stress-bearing horizontal beam. He said he did not know how long the crack was, but he told reporters that American steel was used in the centre’s construction.
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Zabaneh said the cause and the extent of the damage were unknown and the decision to close the terminal was made out of an “abundance of caution.”
He said structural engineers would be working at the building Tuesday night to assess whether it is safe for people to return.
Buses were rerouted to a temporary transit centre about two blocks away that was used during the centre’s construction. A downtown street that runs under the beam was also closed indefinitely, causing traffic chaos at the same time some streets were closed for a conference sponsored by Salesforce that was expected to draw 170,000 attendees.
Enveloped in wavy white sheets of metal veil, the five-level centre includes a bus deck, a towering sky-lit central entrance hall and a rooftop park with an outdoor amphitheater.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the complex faced delays in putting out contracts to bid, and the winning bids were ultimately higher than expected. The terminal’s cost rose from US$1.6-billion at its 2010 groundbreaking to more than US$2-billion in 2016 because of what one analyst called “optimistic assumptions,” according to the Chronicle.
The project, a commanding presence in the city’s South of Market neighborhood, is financed by land sales, federal stimulus grants, district fees and taxes, bridge tolls, and federal and state funds.
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It sits adjacent to another dubious landmark, the so-called sinking condominium, Millennium Tower, which has settled about 18 inches (45 centimetres) since it opened over a former landfill in 2009. Homeowners have filed multiple lawsuits against the developer and the city, some alleging that construction of the transit center caused the Millennium Tower to sink.
Zabaneh said he did not believe that the cracked beam was related to ongoing problems at Millennium Tower.
The online business software company Salesforce, which opened its adjacent 61-storey Salesforce Tower three months ago, bought naming rights to the center in 2017 as part of a 25-year, US$110-million sponsorship agreement.
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