The proposed bypass fix for the troubled Fremont Street girders of San Francisco’s Salesforce Transit Center calls for bolting 20-inch-wide steel cover plates above and below the area around each fractured bottom flange, like a 14-foot-long double splint. The proposed repair detail, presented to the board of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority on December 13, has the unofficial support of the independent peer review panel established to oversee the work of the team investigating the cracks.

The panel, commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in early October, is “in general concurrence” with the fix proposed by the transit center’s engineer-of-record, Thornton Tomasetti, said Michael D. Engelhardt, the chair of the MTC panel, at the December 13 meeting of the TJPA’s board of directors. “It’s a reasonable approach,” added Engelhardt, a professor of structural engineering at the University of Texas, Austin.