SlothSlayer

Good morning from Virginia. 🇺🇸 On the 12th of November in 1936, the American people did what they once did as a matter of course. They threw a bridge across a great bay and opened a new road into the future. From the White House, Franklin Roosevelt pressed a gold telegraph key. Three thousand miles west, the green lights flashed on and the first cars rolled onto the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. Governor Merriam cut the ceremonial chain with an acetylene torch. Herbert Hoover, engineer and former president, stood in the cold wind and called the span the greatest engineering work of Americans since the Panama Canal. Navy planes filled the sky. Pigeons and flag-bearing parachutes rose over the water. Horns and sirens answered from both shores. It had been built in three and a half years in the depths of the Depression. Six thousand five hundred men a day had driven the caissons, spun the cables, and bored the tunnel through Yerba Buena Island. The western crossing was two suspension bridges set end to end, each with a main span of 2,310 feet. The eastern crossing was a great cantilever and a string of trusses. The deepest pier sat 242 feet below the surface of the bay. The tunnel was the largest bore on earth. The whole structure was double-decked so that automobiles, trucks, and electric trains could cross together. Seventy-seven million dollars bought a highway that joined two cities and turned a bay into a single metropolitan region. Within hours the bridge was already carrying the traffic of a nation on the move. A Nebraska car slipped through early and was halfway to Oakland while the dignitaries were still making their ceremonial passage. By nightfall the toll booths had taken in thousands of dollars at sixty-five cents a crossing, and the Navy was sweeping searchlights across the new towers. This was America when it still built. When its engineers still believed the impossible was only the next job, when its workers still knew how to finish what they started, and when its leaders still measured success by the concrete and steel they left behind rather than by the programs they announced. The Bay Bridge stands today as proof of what that people could do. The question is whether their grandchildren still remember how. America 250 🇺🇸