On the same day the California Department of Transportation used a live public Webinar to defend its safety testing of the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge tower foundation, the newspaper that started a safety controversy, The Sacramento Bee, refused Caltrans’ request to retract its most recent story.
Caltrans’ acting director Malcolm Dougherty sent a letter June 7 to Joyce Terhaar, executive editor of the Bee, requesting an immediate retraction of a May 27 story (“Records Raise Doubts on Bay Bridge Concrete”) that asserts a subcontractor disclosed to Caltrans the results of a 2007 foundation test that revealed the concrete hadn’t hardened sufficiently along with other testing problems.