A year after the gas truck accident and conflagration that melted an overpass on the MacArthur Maze, UC Berkeley civil engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh claims that Caltrans paid millions more than necessary and got substandard repairs in its quest to reopen the Maze as quickly as possible. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Astaneh argues that the Caltrans contract stipulated that for every day under fifty it took to finish the job, the contractor would get another $200,000. The contractor, C.C. Meyers, got the job done in just 17 days, but Astaneh claims that if the company had replaced the support beams instead of just repair them, the structure would be much more sound, and it would only have taken four more days. Caltrans officials declined to comment on Astaneh’s analysis.
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