Dive Brief:

• The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has had its share of structural problems, perhaps most famously corroded tensioning rods. There are also portions of the span that have no redundancy, so knowing its health is critical. 
• The bridge is built with accelerometers to gauge its vibratory response to winds whipping through the bay and humidistats that work in connection with temperature and relative humidity loggers.
• Portions of the bridge's structure have dehumidifiers to stall corrosion, so tracking conditions within it is important to maintenance engineers.

Dive Insight:

The bridge is "fracture critical" because some failures could cause major damage. A Carnegie Mellon University program to develop piezoelectric sensors to monitor pipes may be applicable to structural steel, too, and the Bay Bridge would be a candidate for that technology.