You may have heard about this. Sunday morning early, a truck carrying almost 9000 gallons of gasoline hit a guardrail, rolled over, burst into flames, and effectively brought traffic in the East Bay to a screaming halt. The damage is pretty spectacular–the miraculous thing is that the thing happened at 3am, no other cars were involved, and even the driver escaped, albeit with second degree burns–but it’s confined to a relatively small chunk of highway. Unfortunately, it’s a relatively key chunk of highway, known around these parts as the Macarthur Maze.

The Maze connects several different highways in Oakland, leading on and off the Bay Bridge. For all those people who live in the East Bay and work in San Francisco who drive to work, this is long-term trouble. The problem is steel. As I understand it, the actual construction work would go pretty quickly, but it may take a long time to get the steel. There’s an international shortage of steel, it seems. So commuters and travelers are going to have to get used to detours for six months at a minimum. I’m hoping this means a permanent increase in public transportation, but given the devotion of Bay Area drivers to their cars, that may not be very likely.

The SF writer in me (especially the SF writer in me who wrote a post-apocalyptic novel set in New York City) is fascinated by the image of a melted highway. It might be more SFnal if the highway had been tied into a neat bow, but what we got is still pretty spectacular.