The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was to reopen to cars Friday at midnight after a celebration of the quick repair job on the span that was damaged in the Oct. 17 earthquake.
Singer Tony Bennett belted out "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" at the close of an open party on the bridge Thursday but changed the line about "coming home to you, San Francisco," to make it "Oakland-San Francisco."The ceremony featured speeches by Gov. George Deukmejian, San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos and Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson, lauding the repair job on the 53-year-old bridge, which took exactly one month.
Deukmejian called the bridge's reopening "the first major event of the rebuilding process" for northern California, which was struck by a 7.1 magnitude quake that killed 66 people and caused $7 billion in damage.
The politicians spoke from a stand just a few yards from the spot where the temblor sent one end of a 50-foot section of the bridge's upper deck plunging onto the lower deck. One person died when the car she was in fell into the gap.
Thousands of people walked from both ends of the bridge to the ceremony but stopped short of the damaged section, where some minor work remained to be done.
Wilson jokingly reminded Agnos that he was "sitting in Oakland now;" the break was on the Alameda County side of the bridge. The two mayors had carried on a keen rivalry during the World Series between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants. The series, symbolized by the bridge on T-shirts and other items, was interrupted by the temblor.
Those who marched on the bridge from San Francisco included Susan Palumbo, 42, who was in a bus on the bridge when the earthquake hit.
"I didn't feel the quake, but it was scary because we were waiting for an aftershock to take the bridge down," said Palumbo.
Meanwhile, a panel of engineers said the repairs have made the bridge as strong as it was before the Oct. 17 temblor but said that another, similar quake would seriously damage the span.
The bridge, one of the most-traveled in the world, carried an average of more than 260,000 vehicles every work day before the quake.