Federal transport investigators began work on Thursday to establish the cause of the catastrophic collapse of the Mississippi bridge that had been classified as ”structurally deficient” two years ago .
The police put the official death toll at four but predicted that would rise, confirming that rescuers had seen other bodies trapped in submerged cars. Up to 30 people are missing.
In spite of danger from tangled steel girders and unstable concrete blocks, divers were trying to recover the bodies.
The local police chief, Tim Dolan, said recovery would take days: ”The bridge is still shifting. We’re dealing with the Mississippi river. We’re dealing with currents. We’re going to have to do it slowly and safely.”
The collapse highlights again the lack of investment by the world’s superpower in much of its infrastructure, including roads, bridges, dams and, in the case of New Orleans, the levee system.
The American Society of Civil Engineers believes more than 70 000 bridges across the US are rated structurally deficient, the same grading as the one that collapsed in Minneapolis. Engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188-billion.
The bridge, linking Minneapolis and St Paul, buckled in the evening rush hour. Survivors and witnesses told how sections had dropped 19,5m into the river, throwing up a wave of water and a dust cloud. ”Boom, boom, boom and we were just dropping, dropping, dropping,” said Jamie Winegar. Another survivor, Berndt Toivonen, said: ”The bridge started to buckle. It went up, and it came down.”
A bus carrying 52 children was left precariously perched on the bridge but the passengers all managed to escape through an exit at the back.
In a US transport department inventory two years ago, the bridge received a safety rating of 50 on a scale that runs to 120. A score of 80 suggests some rehabilitation may be necessary while 50 suggests replacement.
But the White House spokesperson, Tony Snow, said: ”This doesn’t mean there was a risk of failure but if an inspection report identifies deficiencies, the state is responsible for taking corrective actions.”
Amid conflicting accounts, the governor, Tim Pawlenty, said on Wednesday night that the bridge had been inspected in 2005 and 2006 and that no structural deficiencies had been found.
US President George Bush, whose sharp drop in poll ratings can be traced back to the slowness of his response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, promised on Thursday that the federal government would provide funding to have the bridge rebuilt as quickly as possible. ”We in the federal government must respond, and respond robustly, to help the people there not only recover, but to make sure that lifeline of activity — that bridge — gets rebuilt as quickly as possible,” he said. The Transport Secretary, Mary Peters, who promised $5-million to clear the site, said no bridge in the US should collapse.
There had been construction work under way on the bridge at the time of the collapse, including the use of jackhammers, and investigators will look at whether that contributed to collapse. Some of the 18 construction workers slipped down fallen slabs and one of them is missing. The bridge, built in 1967, is a single 139m steel arch, which avoids putting any piers in the water that might impede river traffic and is also a cheaper option. There are other similar bridges in the US.
‘Cars started flying’
There were lots of stories of lucky escapes on Thursday from the survivors of the Mississippi bridge disaster. But Marcelo Cruz was double-lucky: it was his second narrow escape in a few years.
Cruz (26), from Crystal, Minnesota, was driving a van across the river with hundreds of others during the evening rush hour. With him were children on a bus returning from a day out at a waterpark, people heading home after work and lots of baseball fans going to a game.
Cruz’s chances of survival if he had dropped into the river would have been slimmer than most. He uses a wheelchair since being shot.
On the bridge, he felt it begin to wave up and down. ”I’m lucky to be alive,” he said on Thursday. He saw other cars dropping 20m into the water below and steered into a concrete railing to stop himself joining them.
Onlookers told him to get out. He told them he could not and they carried him in his wheelchair to the riverbank.
Catherine Yankelevich (29) did fall into the river. ”Cars started flying and I was falling and saw the water,” she said. She climbed out the driver’s side window and swam to shore. ”It seemed like a movie. It was pretty scary.”
It could have been worse. Construction work had reduced the usual eight lanes to four. The Mississippi was lower than usual and the water temperature relatively warm. Another lucky survivor was Matt Lundquist, who was on the bridge when a huge section in front of him dropped and a small section behind him collapsed too, leaving his car perched on the apex of the pyramid. – Guardian Unlimited Â