San Francisco Bay Area

Two months after an oil spill blackened San Francisco Bay, authorities Friday were investigating what caused another vessel to hit one of the region's signature bridges. This time, a 300-foot barge loaded with oil struck a piling that supports the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, but no oil spilled. The accident occurred in dense fog and darkness about 6 p.m. Thursday, U.S. Coast Guard officials said. The crews of two tugboats that were towing the oil barge Cascade passed sobriety tests.

Bay Area home sales fell 15% in April from a year earlier and prices declined as lenders made it harder to obtain mortgages, cutting the number of potential buyers. A total of 6,310 new and existing homes and condominiums sold in San Francisco, Marin, San Mateo, Santa Clara and five other counties last month, the lowest for an April since 1995, according to DataQuick Information Systems. The median price dropped 21% to $518,000.

One of the many questions surrounding the development of electric cars is surprisingly prosaic: Will there be someplace to plug the darn things in? A Palo Alto company unveiled a $1-billion plan Thursday that it said would help answer that question -- at least in the Bay Area.

Police in a Bay Area suburb are investigating the slaying of a PC World magazine senior editor after four robbers stormed the family home, shot him to death and pistol-whipped his wife. It remains unclear what lured the thieves to the Pittsburg home of Rex Farrance, 59, on Tuesday night, but an investigator said a large quantity of drugs was seized from the house. Detectives are trying to determine if narcotics were being dealt from the residence.

San Francisco Bay Area home prices dropped to an 18-month low in January as the number of houses and condominium units that changed hands fell for the 24th month in a row, data released Thursday showed. The median price paid for a home in San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa and six other Northern California counties in January was $601,000, a 2.8% drop from December's median and a 1.5% decline from a year earlier, La Jolla-based research firm DataQuick Information Systems said.

A minor earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay area Friday afternoon. The magnitude 3.4 temblor struck on the Hayward fault about 2 miles southeast of Berkeley at 3:46 p.m., according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The jolt was felt in downtown San Francisco and throughout the Bay Area, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injury. Bay Area Rapid Transit trains were stopped for about five minutes for inspection as a precaution. No trains or stations were damaged.

One day after a tanker truck explosion melted a key Bay Area freeway interchange, the scramble toward recovery raced into high gear Monday in a region crippled 18 years ago by massive freeway collapses during an earthquake. The nightmare commute that officials had braced for largely failed to materialize, as many workers who normally flood into San Francisco from the East Bay either altered their hours or simply stayed home.

As the Bay Area struggles to adapt to a freeway system crippled by a collapsed interchange in its busiest corridor, questions persist. Should tankers hauling such flammable material even be permitted to pass through such constricted spaces? Who should be allowed to drive them? And should the collapsed structure and other key traffic arteries be rebuilt to withstand another such conflagration?

The trucking company whose gasoline tanker exploded last month, crippling a busy Bay Area freeway interchange, saw its hazardous-materials transportation license suspended Friday, just hours after the last damaged portion of the MacArthur Maze reopened. The California Highway Patrol suspended Sabek Transportation's license because of safety and hazardous-materials violations discovered during a recent inspection of the company's Salinas Valley terminal, said CHP spokeswoman Fran Clader.

The number of houses and condominium units sold in the San Francisco Bay Area fell 19% last month to the lowest level in 12 years even as sale prices in the region set a record, DataQuick Information Systems said Thursday. A total of 8,080 new and existing single-family houses and condominiums were sold in San Francisco, Napa, Contra Costa and six other Northern California counties last month, down from 9,935 a year earlier, La Jolla-based DataQuick said.