Bay Bridge's new tower starts to rise

Construction crews working high above San Francisco Bay near Yerba Buena Island started some pre-holiday heavy lifting Wednesday as they began raising the sleek white tower for the $6.3 billion new east span of the Bay Bridge.

"We're going to be lifting 4 million pounds of steel 400 feet above the water, and putting it in place, before Christmas," said Bart Ney, a Caltrans spokesman.

Starting at 4:15 a.m., workers moved a 101.7-foot-long segment of the tower under the bridge by barge, tipped it upright, then began slowly hoisting it using a pair of strand jacks to the top of a steel framework that surrounds the first two levels of the four-legged tower already in place.

The tower is made of four independent legs, each of which contains five segments. The legs are rising from their foundation at the same time. The first sections were placed in July, with the second set attached in October.

These four tower pieces, each weighing 551 tons, will be lifted, placed and bolted together from the inside and the outside. And the tower, now 272 feet tall, will grow to 374 feet - taller than Coit Tower, UC Berkeley's Campanile or the Tribune Tower in Oakland. When it's finished - probably in February - it will stand 525 feet above the bay.

Crews will be working around the clock, pulling 12-hour shifts, most likely in wind and rain, until the four sections of tower are raised, said Ney. Weather will likely slow the work, which typically takes about 30 hours for each segment, but it is expected to be completed next week.

"Our goal is to be done by Christmas Eve so the crews can go home and spend the holiday with their families," Ney said.

The four tower segments, along with four more of the wing-shaped steel boxes that make up the bridge deck, arrived from Shanghai aboard the Zhen Hua on Monday. Eight more segments of tower, comprising the final level and the cap, and the final four sections of the deck are due to arrive from the ZPMC steel fabrication plant in China early next year.

While troubles with fabricating the steel deck pieces caused delays, a package of incentives sped up steel deliveries. That, combined with a plan to speed construction of the eastern landing of the new span, prompted bridge officials to announce last week that they will be able to open the bridge in both directions by the end of 2013, instead of the earlier plan to make eastbound drivers wait until 2014.

E-mail Michael Cabanatuan at mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle