Thousands Join Festivities as Bay Bridge Rebounds

As thousands of people strolled, picnicked and sunned themselves on its upper deck, the Bay Bridge was declared to be back in working order Thursday, one month after an entire section of it collapsed during the Bay Area earthquake.

Military bands and a school choir performed, Tony Bennett crooned and Gov. George Deukmejian and a dozen dignitaries hailed the accomplishment of the quick repair job. On the bay below, a fireboat sprayed streams of water. Hundreds of reporters and cameramen recorded the event, which was designed to make note that the Bay Area has been reinvigorated after the Oct. 17 earthquake.

“We are back, and we are in business once again,” Deukmejian declared from a podium yards from where one end of a 50-foot section of the longest high-level bridge in the world broke loose and fell to the deck below, killing one motorist.

In speeches, officials paid homage to crews that worked 24 hours a day to repair the bridge several days ahead of schedule and to the 65 people who died in the 7.1-magnitude earthquake.

“We won’t forget them,” Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy said of the people who died. But knowing that the death toll easily could have been higher, he added: “We thank God for those who survived.”

Each speaker exuded optimism as he returned to the theme of the day--the Bay Area is once again able to absorb hordes of tourists who normally flock to its shops, hotels and restaurants.

But the real crowd-pleaser was Assembly Speaker Willie Brown: “Those of us who have chosen to live in California and particularly the Bay Area would never be undone by a quake, no matter the size, no matter the intensity.”

Work stopped on the lower deck while the speeches went on. People were off the bridge by 2:30 p.m., and work continued on the upper deck.

With concrete curing and guardrails still not in place, vehicles won’t be allowed to cross the bridge until late tonight at the earliest. Caltrans spokesman Bob Halligan said officials hoped the first cars would cross at a minute before midnight.

Wandering unobtrusively among the estimated 11,000 onlookers were several heroes of rescue efforts, including the Caltrans engineer who found Buck Helm buried alive after four days in the debris of the collapsed Nimitz Freeway, the driver who brought a loaded commuter bus to a safe stop a few feet from the downed section of the bridge and a bus passenger who jumped out to help stricken motorists.

“I feel a little better now. For the first half hour I was out here I was shaking,” said bus driver Douglas Burghardt as he eased his way through the crowd to view the newly repaired section of the upper deck. Gazing at the still drying concrete, he added: “I don’t think though that I’m ready to bring a bus across again.”

Different Perspective

Tom Blackwood, a litigation clerk from a San Francisco law firm who had helped free quake victims from automobiles caught in the collapsed section, stood beside him.

“It looks smaller than I remembered it,” he said, gesturing toward the reconstructed section. “That night it looked so big.”

Steve Whipple, an associate engineer for Caltrans, took half a day off to attend the ceremonies and quietly reflect on events that “you never forget.”

“It’s right to have it opened,” he said. “We’ll feel better when they’re all reopened.”

It was Whipple, wandering among the rubble of the Nimitz Freeway in the hope of finding a clue to some unanswered engineering question, who saw a faint movement in the distance. Believing it to be a man waving his hand, he called for a rescue team. Hours later the team removed Helm, pinned in his car, from the wreckage. Helm remains hospitalized with lingering injuries.

Thursday’s event had been billed as a bridge walk, the first ever on the span.

Tickets for the walk cost $6. Of that amount, $4 went to the city bus systems that transported people from San Francisco onto the bridge and from Oakland past the toll plaza. Another $1 went to quake relief, and $1 went to the ticket vending company.”Hey, I’d have paid $20 for this,” said Kalama Schreiner, 35, a custodian for the Mt. Diablo School District.

About 7,500 tickets were sold. As the event drew nearer, several thousand more tickets were given away. Once on the bridge, people were kept 100 feet from the repaired 50-foot section above Pier E-9.

Officials had wanted to limit the number of pedestrians to 40,000, recalling the throngs that jammed the Golden Gate Bridge for its 50th anniversary two years ago. The weight of 800,000 people caused the normally bowed roadway of the bridge to straighten, and people were trapped on the span for hours.

Although the ceremony was on the Oakland side of the 22,720-foot span, the affair took on a San Francisco flavor. San Francisco’s official party-giver, Charlotte Maillard Swig, choreographed much of the event.

Bennett sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and the Navy band played “San Francisco” twice--and inadvertently drowned out a chorus of Oakland schoolchildren once.

Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson--who arrived at the ceremony from San Francisco with Deukmejian and San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos--insisted he did not feel slighted that the celebration had such a San Francisco flavor.

But some of his constituents were irked.

“We get no recognition or respect,” groaned Terry Mitchell, 39, an Oakland audiologist.

“I had to walk it, because I helped put it back together,” said Dennis Carter, who helped carry the banner of the Ironworkers Local 377, one of the locals that supplied the crews for the repair.

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened on Nov. 12, 1936, and long has been the workhorse of Bay Area spans, carrying 260,000 vehicles each weekday.

Final cost figures for the repair will not be known for another six months, said Halligan of Caltrans. But estimates ranged upward of $4 million.

Times staff writers Virginia Ellis and Victor Zonana contributed to this story.