The Oakland project, Ms. Gavin said, was an example of a successful government-private collaboration. Within 24 hours of the devastating crash and fire, the federal government approved some emergency reconstruction money; not long after, the state settled on a design plan.

Image California officials had estimated that repairs to the collapsed ramp between Interstates 80 and 580 in Oakland would take 50 days. Credit... Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

Carl Douglas, the president of a steel fabricator in Coolidge, Ariz., who had access to steel from Pennsylvania and Texas, learned of the business opportunity and contacted several contractors. Two and a half hours before the bids were due, he first talked to Mr. Myers. The contractor promised to share 25 percent of the profits with Mr. Douglas’s company, Stinger Welding, and a deal was struck.

A few hours later, the bids were opened, and C. C. Myers Inc. was the winner. Local lore has it that within 15 minutes of signing the contracts, Mr. Myers had workers and equipment on the scene. He insists that is not true. They were there 15 minutes before the signing, he said.

Shop drawings were approved in hours, not months, and state inspectors were flown to Stinger Welding to oversee quality control. Mr. Douglas, who kept his shop running 20 hours a day, put two drivers in each truck so one could sleep while the other drove the steel girders to California. Rather than wait until all 12 girders arrived, Mr. Myers’s crews formed the deck in parts, pouring the concrete soon after the last girders were delivered. From the start, Mr. Myers said, his crews worked 12-hour shifts around the clock.

Will Kempton, the director of the California Department of Transportation, called Mr. Myers “a unique character” who “represents the best in the industry.”

A spokesman for the State Division of Occupational Safety and Health, Dean Fryer, said that in the last 17 years, C. C. Myers Inc. had suffered only two fatalities, which he called “not unusual” for a “hazardous industry.”

Mr. Myers, who said he quit school in 10th grade and passed only one carpentry test — because a sympathetic proctor fed him the answers — started his career overseeing highway projects for a large contractor, always coming in under budget. After his supervisors were given “skimpy bonuses,” he quit and started his own company.