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Waiting, safety questions shroud Day 2

MINNEAPOLIS - A day after the collapse of the most heavily traveled bridge in Minnesota, fierce currents and giant shards of steel and concrete slowed divers searching the Mississippi River for as many as 30 people reported missing and feared dead.

By evening Thursday, the official death count stood at four, with 79 injured. The search for other victims was halted repeatedly as currents picked up, debris shifted and the waters clouded.

"It's a very dangerous situation around there," Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek said. "There's a lot of debris."

With the cause of the collapse unknown, the federal Transportation Department told all states to inspect bridges similar to the steel-deck truss span that fell, "or, at minimum, review inspection reports to determine if further action is needed." It said there were 756 such bridges.

The Minnesota bridge was deemed "structurally deficient" in 1990, state engineers said, in part because of some corroded bearings, but it was not expected to be replaced until 2020.

The structurally deficient rating "doesn't necessarily mean a bridge is unsafe or in need of replacement," said Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty. "But I think anybody who looks at the national picture ... and says we don't have a problem would be naive."

Dan Dorgan, a state bridge engineer for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, said a "deficient" designation did not mean a bridge needed to be immediately replaced; 77,000 bridges across the country, he said, have a similar designation. Still, Dorgan said: "We thought we had done all we could. Obviously something went terribly wrong."

Steel plating mulled

Structural deficiencies in the bridge were so serious that the Minnesota Department of Transportation last winter considered bolting steel plates to its supports to prevent cracking in fatigued metal, according to documents and interviews with agency officials.

The department went so far as to ask contractors for advice on the best way to approach such a task, which could have been opened for bids later this year.

The Department of Transportation considered the steel plating at the recommendation of consulting engineers who told the agency that it had two ways to keep the bridge safe: make repairs throughout the 40-year-old steel arched bridge or inspect it closely enough to find flaws that might become cracks and then bolt the steel plating only on those sections.

Bridge transportation officials opted against making the repairs out of concern that drilling thousands of tiny bolt holes would weaken it. Instead, the Department of Transportation launched an inspection that was interrupted this summer by unrelated work on the bridge's concrete driving surface.

"We chose the inspection route. In May we began inspections," Dorgan said.

Investigators arrive

The National Transportation Safety Board sent 19 investigators to the scene to begin an investigation into why the eight-lane bridge, which opened in 1967 and carried Interstate 35W through the city's downtown, had in a matter of seconds fallen 60 feet in a cloud of dust.

Among the evidence the safety board must now consider, said Mark Rosenker, its chairman: footage of the collapse captured by a security camera, a computer analysis of the failure and decades of the bridge's inspection reports.

He said the initial challenge will be to pull as much of the wreckage from the river and reassemble it, much like a jigsaw puzzle, in hopes of determining what went wrong.

He said the work could take as long as a year to complete.

Around the city, oddly quiet but for helicopters circling, residents were reeling. Churches held prayer services. Yellow police tape cordoned off block after block near the river.

In the water, divers on barges used sonar devices and global positioning systems to track some of the estimated 50 cars in the river. But they faced numerous setbacks, and the authorities said the process might take days or longer.

"We're dealing with the Mississippi River," said Police Chief Tim Dolan of Minneapolis.

At one point on Thursday, members of the Army Corps of Engineers tried to slow the river's flow to lower the water's 9-foot depth, but found that this created a dangerous suction effect and told the divers to halt.

No bodies were recovered from the waters by Thursday evening, the authorities said.

Pawlenty promised a thorough investigation of what went wrong and said the state would hire an outside firm to conduct an investigation, even as the federal safety board conducted its own. He said he would hire a second company to investigate the state's bridge inspection methods.

He also announced immediate inspections of the state's three other bridges that mimic the design of the 35W bridge and have a similar and unusual steel arch truss design.

Pawlenty said the issue of old, crumbling bridges and roads, however, stretched far beyond Minnesota's borders. "This is a national problem," he said.

Information from the New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Associated Press and Washington Post was used in this report.

Fast Facts:

In Washington

- President Bush talked with officials in Minnesota and made plans to visit there Saturday.

- Bush spokesman Tony Snow said that while the inspection did not indicate the bridge was at risk of failing, "if an inspection report identifies deficiencies, the state is responsible for taking corrective actions."

- A House committee approved legislation that would direct $250-million to Minnesota to help it replace the bridge. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said it was too soon to approve emergency money for a new bridge because it is unclear how much will be needed.

[Last modified August 3, 2007, 00:46:48]