Bay Area Creeps to Work at a Bumper-to-Bumper Pace : Gales, Wild Waves, Rain --Misery

Their misery compounded by soaking rain and bone-chilling winds, hundreds of thousands of Bay Area commuters struggled to work aboard the remaining links of the earthquake-ravaged transportation system today. Conditions across the area were crowded and chaotic, but mass gridlock was avoided.

“We’ve got gale winds, heavy rains and heavy traffic--your basic nightmare conditions,” said California Highway Patrol Officer John Lash. “Somebody up there doesn’t like us.”

Bruce Selby, a spokesman for the Golden Gate Bridge District, said officials there were “absolutely amazed that things are going so smoothly.”

“People are turning to mass transit, he said. “Our buses and ferries are running at double and triple the normal level.”

But “smoothly” was still only relative. Neophyte riders of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District subway were drenched while waiting for cars that carried them, sardine-like, from the East Bay to San Francisco. An armada of ferryboats braved squalls and rough seas to deliver their seasick passengers to San Francisco piers. To the south near the epicenter of Tuesday’s quake, Santa Cruz County travelers made their way to work on Highway 17 thanks to a fleet of CHP escorts.

In Washington, meanwhile, the White House announced that President Bush will seek $2.5 billion in new federal aid for earthquake victims--a figure well below that sought by congressional Democrats who were working on a relief package. Estimates of the actual cost of damages continued to mount, exceeding $6.6 billion at last count.

The San Francisco coroner added two more victims to the list of confirmed dead, bringing that tally to 61. Another 52 people were officially missing and believed trapped in the yet-uncleared wreckage of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland. Officials in Santa Cruz also launched a search for a man believed to have been trapped in a landslide on Sunday.

Bay Area workers, returning en masse to work for the first time since Tuesday’s 6.9 temblor, were forced onto BART trains, ferries and roundabout freeways because of the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Authorities were also forced to close I-280 and San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway because of threatening cracks.

By 10:30 a.m., BART had carried 99,732 passengers, compared to an average of 69,638 on a normal weekday. Two passengers fainted after getting off trains at the Embarcadero Station after crossing the bay.

“They were hyperventilating, I guess from being nervous in the tube,” said Debby Tudor, a Westinghouse Elevator technician dispatched to tend to the station’s escalators.

But traffic from the northern suburbs over the Golden Gate Bridge was fast and smooth. And the morning commute on Highway 101 from the southern suburbs began light--but then the freeway flooded.

“Mother Nature is having a field day with us,” commuter Joyce Bustinduy said.

At sea, it was even rougher. Hundreds of commuters--many afraid of traveling in the under-bay BART tube--sought to make their way to work aboard ferries, but found the boats crowded and the seas wild.