Free Frosty, my foot!

Poor Lloyd LaCuesta over at KTVU and other journalists at KRON and such have been forced to monitor the twists and turns of the infamous finger-in-the-Wendy's chili case.

It looked like something right out of Strange Brew to us, but people must be riveted by said finger. Ever since a lady took a bite of something special off the dollar menu, the news outlets have been right there. A Yahoo! news search for "Wendy's," "finger," and "chili" yielded 1,072 results. Now, those results are just mentions, and some may be duplicates of the same AP story, but it shows the finger has legs, so to speak, as a headline-grabber in other states.

Hiding in the shadows is the far more disturbing but less snazzy case of questionable welding in the reconstruction of the Bay Bridge that connects San Francisco to Oakland.

As mentioned earlier, the Oakland Tribune performed an exhaustive investigation into a tip off to the FBI that some welders were being paid off to hurry up the job so the contractor would avoid cost overruns.

Workers told the Oakland Tribune, which has the results of its in-depth investigation here, that the "$1.5 billion skyway held up by 160 steel legs" is "riddled with weak welds, because some supervisors ordered welders to hide defects."

If you live in the Bay Area, consider the article required reading.

According to the Trib, "In interviews or in testimony, welders describe a skyway worksite where KFM paid cash bonuses to hurry the job, leading to shoddy work and injury cover-ups."

Naturally, Caltrans wants to defend its decisions. "We've got good welds, good procedures and everything is in place to have a quality product. If a defect got in, we can't find it," said Caltrans project manager Pete Siegenthaler.

Of course he can't find it. No one can find it. The welds have already been poured over with concrete.

For that matter, few people can find the article. In a Yahoo! news search for "Bay Bridge" and "weld," there were only 103 results.

Granted, the story is fresher than the Wendy's chili (pun intended), but, if true, the Bay Bridge Bungle will endanger untold numbers of motorists and is costing taxpayers. As a taxpayer (we paid a few days ago), we at the Pepper don't mind paying for improvements to the Bay Bridge. But we're not paying for improvements to the KFM Joint Venture bank account.

In short, this story should be splashed ALL OVER the local television. Yet, while we at the Pepper were watching the morning news, we saw little Wendy's face staring back at us, the very image of evil.