On June 15, the same day the California Dept. of Transportation used a live public webinar to defend its safety testing of a new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge tower foundation, the newspaper that started the safety controversy, The Sacramento Bee, refused to retract a story to which Caltrans objected.
Caltrans' acting director, Malcolm Dougherty, sent a letter on 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 thatrevealed the concrete had not hardened sufficiently, along with other testing problems.