Watch the New East Span of S.F.'s Bay Bridge Go Up in 2 Minutes

Attention, Bay Area residents: Would you like to see the bridge on which you'll soon spend hours stuck in teeth-grinding traffic jams? Webcam company EarthCam obliges with this well-put-together time lapse of the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge's eastern span rising over the past three-and-a-half years, a monumental engineering effort that's so far cost more than $6 billion. (The initial estimates amounted to one-third of that cash mountain, FYI.)

Lots of the expense of the project is coming from the way engineers are earthquake-proofing the span. The need to rebuild the eastern section arose after a big chunk of it collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta temblor; with scientists predicting a better than 50 percent chance of a "tectonic time bomb" exploding in the next couple decades, the bridge builders really want to make sure that their efforts don't turn into falling rubble.