An excerpt from *I Left My Brains in San Francisco* concerning bridges

In  Neeta Lyffe, Zombie Exterminator: I Left My Brains in San Francisco, I wrote about a bridge that was badly constructed.  It was tarted on each end of the bay and didn't meet in the middle.  I figured I was writing fiction, then I saw this photo in a blog on 31 building mistakes. I had to share!

They were coming up on the I-80 Bay Bridge.  Neeta followed Ted's pointing finger to the blocked-off exit beside the original bridge.  Beyond it was a beautiful and abandoned stretch of highway that ended abruptly to start again, closer to San Francisco. 

"Hey!  That's where I'm supposed to make my appearance for Zehedron Hummers!  That's kind of weird."  Neeta said.

Ted switched the radio to the GPS-Guided Tours station.

"If you look to your right, you will see the famous Broken Bridge.  The Broken Bridge was started in 2037, a joint cooperative between the State of California and the Cities of San Francisco and Richmond.  Federal highway monies were allocated to the state, which in turn divided it between the cities.  Each city hired its own contractor to complete its half of the bridge.  Part of the Commission of Highway Expenditures And Programs Initiative, the plan would have saved the governments hundreds of thousands of dollars, except that fifteen months into construction, it was discovered that the two halves of the bridge would not meet, but in fact miss each other at a height difference of over sixty feet.  Two months later, an agreement was reached with the Roadbuilder's Union to halt construction with only one hundred and two feet of linear distance left to connect the two halves.

"Currently, the Supreme Court is trying to unravel the myriad of suits and counter-suits as both cities, the state, the companies, and the Roadbuilder's Union, plus the Association for the Prevention of Stupid Government Spending, sue each other over the errors.  In the meantime, the bridge has become an important cultural and events center, with the cities of Richmond and San Francisco renting out their respective halves of the bridge in order to recoup some of their financial losses and legal fees.

"Designed to withstand even a 9.8 earthquake, the Broken Bridge would have been a marvel of engineering, had it been completed.  It is visible to east-bound traffic on I-80, as well as accessible for westbound traffic in San Francisco.  We hope you will return later to admire this testimony to the Ingenuity of Man." 

Find Neeta Lyffe: I Left My Brains in San Francisco on Amazon.