David and Mr.Harris below are correct if you are not a firefighter and have never fought a bridge fire you do not knw how hard it is to put out a timber fire, once the timbers begin to burn even when you think they are out they begin to burn again. The water tank cars only can hold a finite amount of water and with a pumper pulling 500gpm you would empty these old 10,000 gallon cars in a short time. Even with "wet water" and foam this bridge was gone before the FD could mount an attack based on how fast the fire spread under conditions with little or no wind and the whole stucture buring in less than 20 minutes you could only hazard a guess as to ARSON.

Sac fire and Sac Metro and the other departments that came in to back them up did a great job.

The homeless probelm in the State of Califorina has gotten out of control. UP or BNSF or Local police for that matter can remove them from the property only to have more come back within a few hours and this is a park below the bridge so you can not evict the homeless from public property in CA without notice and then you must find them a shelter to be in even if they do not want to be there. We need to do like Chicago and some other cites do, arrest them and then on release give them a bus ticket out of town. Chicago gives them tickets to Califorina.

As usual I see Coleman has lots of ideas and makes much noise and the UP bashers want to place all the blame on the UP, but they had heavy equipment on site this AM and have started to work on the bridge and had detours going for both freight and passsenger early on last night. While things may run slower and there may be some delays UP has kept trains running Via the WP.

You will be surprised at how quick UP will rebuild the bridge approach. And for those that think a wood bridge is a risk. If the stucture is sound it does not make good economic sense to replace a wood stucture until it has passed it useable life and this bridge in no way needed replacement.