Replacing Oakland's Cypress Freeway

Public Roads, March-April, 1998 by Brett Jackson

When the quake occurred at 5:04 p.m., a television audience of an estimated 60 million baseball fans in the United States and millions in other countries were watching the pregame broadcast of the third game of the 1989 World Series at San Francisco's Candlestick Park. Their screens went black. When power was restored at the ballfield, the sportscasters became newscasters, providing reports of the damage to the stadium and to other parts of the area.

In a matter of seconds, more than 100 people were killed and 3,000 were injured in the third most lethal earthquake in U.S. history.(1) None of the millions of people glued to their television sets that evening or who saw subsequent news broadcasts - and certainly, none of the people of the Bay Area - will ever forget the dramatic and tragic scenes of destruction.

And none of the scenes were more dramatic or more tragic than the collapse of the Cypress Freeway, Interstate 880. In a report for Time magazine, Oct. 30, 1989, Ed Magnuson described it this way:

"To the north in Oakland, auto mechanic Richard Reynolds glanced at the traffic on the double-decker I-880 freeway across the street and urged a friend not to drive to night school until after the rush hour. Minutes later, Reynolds felt 'a ripple.' Then a neighbor screamed a warning. He ran out of his shop to find 'the whole goddam ground lifting up.' He grabbed a telephone pole as the sidewalk buckled beneath his feet and looked up at a horrifying sight. A mile-long section of the freeway's upper deck began to heave, then collapsed onto the lower roadway, flattening cars as if they were beer cans. 'It just slid. It didn't fall. It just slid,' said Reynolds. 'You couldn't see nothing but dust. The people came out of the dust.' But not many."(1)

A Community Stands as the Freeway Collapses

The destroyed section of I-880 between 7th and 18th streets in West Oakland had to be removed. This segment of interstate was a major route for motorists traveling to and from San Francisco, Berkeley, and the South Bay. Before the earthquake, more than 160,000 vehicles used this eight-lane structure every day. With this highway out of service, the I-880 traffic shifted to the remaining parts of the Oakland freeway network, causing I-980 and portions of I-580 to become heavily congested.

With this tragedy came an opportunity for the residents of West Oakland. Community involvement was a very important part of the rebuilding process, which took nearly eight years.

The original Cypress structure was part of the Nimitz Freeway, built in the 1950s, bisecting West Oakland neighborhoods. Through the environmental impact process, the public outcry resulted in the selection of an alternative route that better fit the needs of the traveling public and the needs of the residents of West Oakland. The new freeway was relocated to the west along the Southern Pacific railroad corridor. This route created the additional challenge of removing more than 161 km of track. Although residents wanted to move the freeway completely out of Oakland, the selected route was a compromise that eliminated the physical and psychological barriers of an obtrusive freeway in this thriving port community.

The community involvement didn't stop there. A public information office and a Citizens' Advisory [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED] Committee were established to keep the public informed and to voice community opinion on everything from the removal of hazardous waste to detour schedules. As part of the public outreach, the Cypress Freeway Employment Clearinghouse encouraged the hiring of area residents, minorities, and women to rebuild and provide materials for the new freeway.

Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) and the community of West Oakland established the following goals, which were reflected in the advertising of the bid package of the major contracts:

* 35-percent Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) participation.

* 20-percent Local Business Enterprise (LBE) participation.

* 45-percent employment of local residents, minorities, and women on a craft-by-craft basis by hours of employment.

Caltrans hired an independent consultant, the Cypress Independent Monitoring Team, to monitor DBE contract compliance on the project. The headquarters of this team was collocated with the public information center on 7th Street at a site that was easily accessible to all West Oakland residents.

Table 1 shows that community outreach can produce results.

Construction

The project's $1.1 billion budget, 90 percent of which came from federal emergency relief funds, comprised approximately $650 million for construction, $350 million for right-of-way acquisition and for the relocation of the railroad and utilities, and the remainder for traffic management, transit enhancement, and mitigation.

The project was broken into two phases. Phase 1 included the construction of the new western mainline along the railroad corridor and restored I-880 for traffic to and from San Francisco. Phase 2 included a connection with 1-80 for traffic to and from Sacramento.