The California Department of Transportation is urging travelers who will be making a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area during Labor Day weekend to plan ahead and choose an alternate route now, and allow plenty of extra travel time because the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, along Interstate 80, will be closed.

The bridge will be shut down from 8 p.m., August 28, until 5 a.m., September 3, while workers take the bridge’s original East Span out of service and open the new bridge to traffic, according to Caltrans.

The opening of the new eastern span comes almost 24 years after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake snapped a section of the bridge, and almost 12 years since construction started.

Also, 15 I-80 connector ramps to the bridge will be closed, nine in San Francisco, six in Oakland.

More details about the closure are available at http://baybridgeinfo.org/ or http://511.org/ to find out which other Bay Area bridges are available as detour routes.

Caltrans says it successfully closed the bridge without significant traffic backups during Labor Day weekends in 2006, 2007, and 2009, by taking advantage of historically light traffic on the bridge during the holiday weekend.