Twin Cities bridge disaster

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Originally posted by 007?:
See... this is what I was referring to, Shock. [img]wink.gif[/img]

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I truly believe what I said above 007....watch stolenhonor.com

Obviously a terrible tragedy, I am in no way belittling it.

But ever since Katrina, when it comes to disasters/tragedies, I find myself more interested in the coverage/opining of them than the actual disasters themselves. I mean, yes we have to have complete answers to all our questions within minutes, but is it asking too much to at least try to get it right?

I mean, what's the death toll? I've heard 3, 4, 7, and 9, and not necessarily in that order. It just doesn't matter, does it? At some point down the road we'll know the actual death toll, but for now, we can just go with any old number.

How many cars went in? I've heard 30, 40, over 50, and 37.

Love those pundits. And the web boards are even better. Predictably, at Democratic Underground, I read posts blaming the Republicans in Washington. Of course, over at Free Conservatives, the hope was that, for the sake of muslims in the Minneapolis area, they better hope and pray it wasn't arab terrorism.

I originally head 7 as well Lew, then it went down to 4.
Last I heard, there were still 30 people missing as well.

I guess since they do it "on the fly" so to speak, they are dealing with the same reports they give us. Now much time to triple check the numbers until later on so they always say there are 7 "believed dead" or "as many as 7 fatalities"

My condolences, again, to all those who lost loved ones in the disaster.

Back up to 5!


MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- Divers at a collapsed interstate bridge prepared Friday to work through the opaque Mississippi River in a painstaking search that has found five bodies so far, with as many as 30 people still missing.

At least 79 injured when the Interstate 35W bridge plummeted more than 60 feet into the river during Wednesday's rush hour. The medical examiner's office confirmed early Friday that a fifth body had been pulled from the river late Thursday.

The search efforts were to continue even as authorities reviewed the safety record of the bridge, which had been designated "structurally deficient" as early as 1990.

Police said the death count would surely grow because bodies had been spotted in the fast-moving currents.

"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 I-35W bridge, which carried 141,000 vehicles a day, was in the midst of mostly resurfacing repairs when it buckled during the Wednesday evening rush hour.

Dozens of cars plummeted more than 60 feet into the Mississippi River, some falling on top of one another. A school bus sat on the angled concrete.

Among the missing is Sadiya Sahal, 23, and her 2-year-old daughter, Hanah Mohamed. Sahal, who is five months pregnant, left home at 5:15 p.m. with the toddler in the back seat. She called her family at 5:30 p.m. saying she was stuck in traffic on the bridge, according to Omar Jamal, a spokesman for the family. That was her last phone call.

"Her husband is destroyed. He's in shock," Jamal said.

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.

Ronald Engebretsen said he and his family were trying to come to grips with his wife's death. "She's a great person. She's a person of great conviction, great integrity, great honesty and great faith in her God," he said.

National Transportation Safety Board chairman Mark Rosenker said his investigators got two big breaks Thursday with a surveillance video showing the collapse and a computer program that would analyze how the bridge failed. Those two things would speed their work and allow them to do a smaller reconstruction of part of the bridge span, rather than the whole thing.

Despite the powerful images of devastation from the collapse, some believed the design of the bridge reduced the death toll.

Joseph Schofer, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University, said the bridge's underlying arch truss stopped heavy pieces of steel from falling onto vehicles when the cars plunged into the water.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty responded Thursday by ordering 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 or immediately repaired.

"There was a view that the bridge was ultimately and eventually going to need to be replaced," he said.

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."

Authorities cautioned not to read too much into the "structurally deficient" tag. The designation means some portions of the bridge needed to be scheduled for repair or replacement. It wasn't a candidate for replacement until 2020.

The collapsed bridge is one of 1,160 bridges in that category, which amounts to 8 percent of bridges in the state. Nationally, about 12 percent of bridges are labeled "structurally deficient."

During the 1990s, inspections found fatigue cracks and corrosion in the steel around the bridge's joints. Those problems were repaired. Starting in 1993, the bridge was inspected annually instead of every other year.

State bridge engineer Dan Dorgan said the bearings could not have been repaired without jacking up the entire deck of the bridge. Because the bearings were not sliding, inspectors concluded the corrosion was not a major issue.

After a study raised concern about cracks, the state was given two alternatives: Add steel plates to reinforce critical parts or conduct a thorough inspection of certain areas to see if there were additional cracks. They chose the inspection route, beginning that examination in May.

"We thought we had done all we could," Dorgan told reporters near the mangled remains of the span. "Obviously something went terribly wrong."

The collapsed bridge's last full inspection was completed June 15, 2006. The report shows previous inspectors' notations of fatigue cracks in the spans approaching the river, including one four feet long that was reinforced with bolted plates.

Although concern was raised about cracks, some experts theorized it's no coincidence the collapse happened when workers and heavy equipment were on the bridge. The construction work involved resurfacing and maintenance on guardrails and lights, among other repairs.

"I would be stunned if this didn't have something to do with the construction project," said David Schulz, director of the Infrastructure Technology Institute at Northwestern University. "I think it's a major factor."

We have been on that bridge, and Trav used it all the time when he's in MN.

My grandmother always taught me that you reap what you sow in life.

We built a massive metropolitan city 9 feet below sea level. Now this wouldn't have been a problem had that city been located in central Nevada. But this particular city happened to be surrounded on all sides by water. No biggie, we'll build floodwalls to protect the city from the water. Those floodwalls are built to withstand a category 3 hurricane. Yes hurricanes can be classifed up to category 5, but the odds are that no worse than a category 3 will ever hit those floodwalls.

Well son of a gun a cat 5 came through, smashed holes in the floodwalls, the city flooded and hundreds died. And then we wonder how could this happen?

Let's think about highways and bridges for a moment. We don't build things to last forever, everything has to have a shelf life. Why? The justify-our-existence syndrome. Do you want to be lonely like the Maytag repairman? Or do you want to be busy like the highway contstruction workers?

Oh we just had to have our Interstate highway system. But we had to build it so it constantly needed repairs. And if the numbers are correct.....70,000 bridges are "structurally deficient?" And it would take $188B to repair them all?

So one of those structurally deficient bridges has collapsed and people have died. Now, it's a tragedy in every sense of the word. But is it all that shocking? Though these things don't occur often, they have occurred in the past and common sense tells us that, unless we start repairing the deficient bridges, the odds of a recurrence will increase.

I'm coming back to this thread to explain that one of the reasons I don't have my own bike is because of bridges.

I close my eyes when I'm on the back of Trav's bike, because I do believe they're all going to collapse. I'm smart enough to know that driving a bike with closed eyes would not be a good thing.

It's interesting to me that the news folks are referring to it as 35 WEST. It's not. It's just 35W. When Trav and I were trying to get directions from the fairgrounds back to our hotel, locals were telling us to take 35W. I was feeling all smart and stuff and repeated "35 west". They all laughed and let us know that it's just 35W.

I don't know why.

THis is the part that's going to be questioned the most....

"The search efforts were to continue even as authorities reviewed the safety record of the bridge, which had been designated "structurally deficient" as early as 1990."

"structurally Deficient", words you never want associated with anything, especially not a bridge.

<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ August 03, 2007 07:14 PM: Message edited by: cincygreg ]</font>

Gae- remember I worked for St. Paul Insurance for 5 years, I made several trips up there and spent a lot of time interacting with those cats. They won't admit it, of course, but the reason they called it 35W instead of 35 West is that, prior to you mentioning it to them, they never made the connection that the "W" in 35W and the "E" in 35E meant "west" and "east", respectively. And the reason for that is, bless their hearts, it's not that they're dumb or anything, but their brains spend so much of the year exposed to sub-arctic temperatures that....well, they're kinda slow. If you were to drop them off in Arizona for, oh, about a year or so, their mind would thaw out completely and they'd be good to go. As is, the simpler the better.

Greg- remember when it comes to government regulation, a lot of it is good ol'-fashioned CYA. I had a private pilot tell me one time that if he maintained his airplane to a level of full compliance with each and every single FAA regulation on the books, it would be impossible for the plane to even fly in the first place. You have to figure out which things are and aren't important.

I've never called a bridge expert as a witness, but assuming they're no different than other witnesses, I'm sure I could find one to pretty much tell me whatever I wanted. If I needed to show that the bridge was about ready to crumble, I could do that; if I needed to show it was ok, I could show that as well.

A few things should be kept in mind here- just because the bridge was "structurally deficient," that in and of itself has no bearing on the cause. You still have to show a connection and, if you let the forensic people do their job, you may be able to actually find out what happened.

I'm hearing now that there was an awful lot of equipment and materials left on that bridge due to the on-going repairs. All bridges have a load factor. What if the combined weight of all the cars on the bridge plus the equipment/materials exceeded that load factor?

Also, since they were working on the bridge, what if the repair work somehow did something that weakened the structural integrity?

I'm just speculating, of course, but these are the questions you have to ask.

Instead, we see a bridge that collapses, and right away, it's the fault of (fill-in-the-blank). At Democratic Underground, the cause of the failure was a lack of federal funding. At Free Conservatives, it's the result of the welfare state.

Lewbaby, you forgot the part about all their fair food being on sticks.

We rode to Minneapolis in 2004 for Polaris' 50th anniversary party and met a local couple at the hotel. The next day was a grand party at the fairgrounds, complete with Arlen Ness. (Google it if you don't know who he is.)

I thought Doug and Dee were joking when they started talking about fried pickles on a stick, pork chops on a stick... EVERYTHING was on a stick!

But I'll give you the brain freeze thing. Folks up there spend big bucks on bikes, and get to ride about 10 to 12 weeks out of the year.