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UPDATE: November 14, 2023: California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the section of I-10 damaged in a weekend fire in Los Angeles will not need to be demolished, but that repairs can be made “surgically” to shore up the columns that support the elevated highway.
“But now it looks like good news that the framework plan will allow us to do the surgical repairs,” Newsom said during a news conference Tuesday. “We’ll open at least four of the five lanes” in three to five weeks, Newsom said.
The original story appears below.
Dive brief:
- Firefighters in California are investigating one heavy fire under a stretch of I-10 in downtown Los Angeles over the weekend as a house fire, according to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.
- Newsom declared a state of emergency Saturday and pledged to repair the 10-lane-wide, 450-foot-long section of the elevated freeway supported by roughly 100 columns as soon as possible. The section remains closed indefinitely.
- By late Monday, shoring had begun on the damaged piers and engineers were taking core samples to determine the structural integrity of the span. The governor’s office said initial results were encouraging, but more tests are needed to assess the full extent of the damage. “The structural integrity of the deck appears to be much stronger than originally assessed,” Newsom said during a press conference Monday afternoon.
Diving knowledge:
Newsom stressed that officials were still considering tearing down the span and rebuilding it from the ground up. Photos showed columns charred by the fire and collapsed under the bridge deck, as well as twisted railings deformed by a fire that started in a storage yard under the roadway, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Newsom said the state took legal action months ago to evict the site’s tenant, Apex Development Inc., a Southern California construction company, for not paying rent and violating its lease by subletting the property without state and federal approval. Apex Development did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Newsom’s office said the emergency declaration would make it easier to clean up and repair the highway. The governor’s edict also directed Caltrans, the California DOT, to formally request assistance through the Federal Highway Administration’s Emergency Assistance Program, if applicable. FHWA Administrator Shailen Blatt visited the site Monday.
Approximately 300,000 vehicles a day transit the span, a vital connector for the flow of cargo in and out of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. These ports handle more than half of the goods that arrive in the country, according to the Associated Presswhich reported that President Joe Biden has been briefed on the impacts of the fire.
Newsom said the damage “substantially larger” than a portion of Interstate 95 that collapsed on the East Coast in June after a tanker caught fire underneath, according to CNN. Although that repair was eventually completed in two weeks at a cost of $25 million to $30 million, Los Angeles officials on Monday did not provide a timeline or cost estimate for fixing the road. The Associated Press reported that damage from a 2011 fuel tanker fire on State Route 60 east of Los Angeles took six months to repair at a cost of $40 million .
In a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg pledged the support of the federal governmentsaying the US Department of Transportation will “help in any way we can.”
