San Fran's Bay Bridge closed 'indefinitely' due to snapped cable

San Francisco's Bay Bridge closed Tuesday evening after a cable and two rods broke free and crashed onto the bridge. Transportation officials are preparing contingency plans to address a possible extended closure of the California landmark.

FOX40 reports that the "San Francisco Bay Bridge will be closed indefinitely following an accident in which a cable snapped near a newly renovated portion of the bridge." According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the three pieces, which were part of the emergency repair over Labor Day weekend, crashed onto the upper deck of the span. Heavy winds are cited as the cause of two rods and a cable brace snapping and crashing onto the bridge. The falling debris is blamed for three vehicle accidents. No inuries were reported. The incident happened just after 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday. The SF Chronicle quotes California Highway Patrol Office Peter Van Eckhardt as saying:

The pieces crashed across the westbound lanes of the Bay Bridge's eastern span, east of Yerba Buena Island, at about 5:30 p.m. They hit three vehicles, but miraculously, nobody was seriously injured.

CHP closed three lanes of the upper deck immediately following the incident so that engineers could inspect the damage. Facing a possible extended closure of the busiest bridge in the Bay Area, transporation officials began preparing contingency plans. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) spokesman Linton Johnson told the SF Chronicle:

The agency would bring in extra train operators today in anticipation of the thousands of additional riders likely to flock to the system. We're going to use every available piece of equipment, meaning all the cars we can possibly muster into service.

The 73-year-old Bay Bridge connects the cities of San Francisco and Oakland in California. The bridge, according to the AP, is "a California landmark that carries about 260,000 vehicles a day."