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Bay Bridge Project: Lost Opportunity for US Jobs?

CNBC.com | June 01, 2012 | 10:34 AM EDT

It is designed to be an icon—and unlike any bridge in the country.

After years of debate and delays, the dramatic new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is finally taking shape.

At the heart of the project is a unique "self-anchored suspension span" — twin roadways linked to a soaring, 500-foot tower by a single, mile-long cable.

A little over a year before the bridge's scheduled opening, the bridge is already a conversation piece, though not for the reasons planners had hoped.

Instead of marveling at the design, what many are talking about is the fact that the suspension portion of the bridge was made in China.

Critics say the decision to outsource the span — the central tower and the two 1,500 foot steel road decks were fabricated in a specially-built factory in China and shipped to San Francisco Bay — was a missed opportunity to create thousands of American manufacturing jobs.

California officials contend the U.S. does not have the manufacturing capacity or the workforce to build such a project on its own.

A CNBC Investigations Inc. review of the process has found miscommunication, misconceptions and missteps that have, at the very least, tainted what planners had hoped would be an architectural and engineering triumph.

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