The Bay Bridge opened this morning at 7:00 a.m. after emergency repairs to a cracked i-bar, despite earlier predictions by CalTrans that the fix would take until Wednesday morning. Live video feed of the new 300-foot section of the birdge.

“Everything went perfect” with the emergency repair job to the span, said Dam Himrick, president of bridge contractor C.C. Myers.

The illustration, from ktvu.com, shows Highway Patrol cars leading the first traffic across the bridge at sunrise this morning.

A crack was discovered Saturday in one of the members holding up the cantilever section of the Bay Bridge — a section of the bridge not supposed to be worked on at all in this weekend’s massive bridge section switchout. Discovered during the detailed inspection that was carried out as part of the bridge shutdown, the flaw was serious enough to have closed the bridge on its own, CalTrans engineers said.

The unforeseen problem may delay the scheduled 5 a.m. reopening of the bridge to commuter traffic on Tuesday morning.

CalTrans said this morning it has no estimate for when the bridge may reopen.

You can follow the project’s Twitter account, baybridgeinfo, for updates.

Yesterday afternoon, you’d think all roads were going to be closed the way people were sheer panicking at the thought of the”clusterf**k”. I don’t know these folks, all I know is they live in SF and work in the East Bay, and the thought of public transit for one day, before a major vacation, has them freaking out. I think our reliance on the car, in the Bay Area, for commuting, is too great.

California’s High Speed Rail Authority delayed a vote to award a $9 million public relations contract when some commission members let it be known that the contract was about to be awarded to some cronies of Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger, and that two of the three commission members who recommended the PR firm used to work with one of its principals.

Wasn’t Schwartzenegger elected by promising not to do business as usual?

You’ve no doubt by now noticed that the sites got a bit of a re-design and some things got changed around last week. We wanted to highlight two changes to make sure everyone knows what changed.

The first and biggest is COMMENTS! Registration is no longer required to post a comment on any post. Of course if you already have an account you can still login to ensure your comments are attributed to you, but those who don’t can now post a comment without any long term commitment. Also, on the right you can see some of the recent comments so you’ll always know what the active discussions are. This was the most requested thing we’ve heard from people since our last redesign and we’re excited to see where it leads.

The next change is also something that was heavily requested, and that is a change to the ADS on the sites. You’ll immediately notice fewer of them, but what might not be as obvious is those smaller square ones to the right are specific to this city only and are being sold for a flat rate for a period of time rather than a confusing CPM/traffic/network model. Depending on the city, these range from $7-$175 for a full week. If you purchase one, during that time your ad will be the only one in that spot and will show on every page. We set these up both to make it easier for smaller local businesses to get their ads on our site, and also to help us bring in ads that relate better to our local audiences. Also, keeping these sites online is expensive and every little bit helps.

There are a bunch of other things we changed but we’ll leave those to you to investigate and take advantage of. Hope you like it, and we look forward to seeing you in the comments!!

Love,
The folks at MBHQ

Eight firefighters from San Francisco were among those who traveled from northern to southern California to help out with the wildfires down there, but the head of SF’s firefighters’ union says he was “embarrassed” they couldn’t send more.

“We have 250 firefighters that are highly trained, and they want to be in the middle of the fight,” said union chief John Hanley.

A spokesperson for the SFFD said the city couldn’t spare more because “some rigs were out of service” and several crews were busy all weekend battling a warehouse blaze.