Death Toll Hits Five, Eight Still Missing Following Minneapolis Bridge Collapse
Posted August 3, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
On Wednesday Minneapolis’ Interstate-35W bridge collapsed, killing at least five, injuring 79 and leaving as many as eight people still missing. It was a disaster that left the city and its people in shock, and according to the U.S. federal government, it’s an accident that’s almost 20 years in the making.
It was 1990 when the federal government first issued an ominous label for the state’s busiest bridge: “structurally deficient,” and in the ensuing years inspectors found cracks and corrosion. Still, inspections were doubled and repairs were made, and local officials said there were no safety issues at all.
But that wasn’t the case, and with the 40-year-old bridge lying partially in the Mississippi River and the death toll certain to rise, the story will get worse before it gets better.
“We have a number of vehicles that are underneath big pieces of concrete, and we do know we have some people in those vehicles,” Police Chief Tim Dolan said Thursday. “We know we do have more casualties at the scene.”
The eight-lane bridge carried 141,000 vehicles a day, and was undergoing resurfacing repairs when it buckled Wednesday evening during rush hour.
Officials identified the dead as Sherry Engebretsen, 60, of suburban Shoreview; Julia Blackhawk, 32, of Savage; Patrick Holmes, 36, of Moundsview; and Artemio Trinidad-Mena, 29, of Minneapolis.
It’s a certain tragedy, but if there could possibly be good news, it’s that National Transportation Safety Board investigators got two big breaks Thursday with surveillance video showing the collapse, allowing a computer program to analyze exactly how the bridge failed.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty ordered an immediate inspection of all bridges in the state with similar designs, but said the state was never warned that the I-35W bridge needed to be closed.
“There was a view that the bridge was ultimately and eventually going to need to be replaced,” he said. “But it appears from the information that we have available that a timeline for that was not immediate or imminent, but more in the future.”
More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the I-35W bridge, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion.
“I think anybody who looks at the national picture, the national statistics and says that we don’t have a problem would be naive or misleading the situation,” Pawlenty said. “We have a major problem.”
However, some authorities cautioned not to read too much into the “structurally deficient” tag, insisting the designation means some portions of the bridge needed to be scheduled for repair or replacement. 35W wasn’t a candidate for replacement until 2020.
