Bridge Collapse Search Continues

(CBS/AP)  After nearly a week of searching for victims of an interstate bridge collapse, rescue coordinators are turning to U.S. Navy divers.

Local dive teams have yet to recover the eight people missing and believed dead in last Wednesday's disaster, in part because of dangerously unstable wreckage.

"Now it's time to start going through the debris," Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek said. "My folks are not salvage experts, and that's why I brought in the ones that are, the Navy."

FBI dive teams have also arrived to join in the search, with technology that includes a small submarine equipped with a robotic arm. And work has begun to move heavy equipment into position to eventually hoist away the tons of concrete and steel left by the collapse.

In addition to the missing, there are five known dead. Five victims also remain hospitalized in critical condition.

As the recovery effort enters a new stage, teams of designers and builders are racing to meet a dawn Wednesday deadline for showing they are qualified to bid on the bridge replacement project, which the state has put on a fast track.

State transportation officials hope to award contracts next month, with the goal of having a new Interstate 35W bridge standing at the end of 2008.

A severe winter could throw off the state's reconstruction schedule. But other conditions are favorable - including a construction industry with plenty of available resources to take on such a daunting challenge.

"It is doable. It is a bit fast, but this is an emergency," said Khaled Mahmoud with the Bridge Engineering Association in New York. "And if we are ever good at anything, it's responding to emergencies."

Erecting a new bridge like Minneapolis' would ordinarily take about three years, even if the design and building phases were overlapped to save time, said Bill Cox, owner of Corman Construction Inc. in Annapolis Junction, Md., a road and bridge construction firm.

The goal of awarding contracts in mid-September is highly ambitious given the array of questions to be answered, including whether to mimic the former bridge's alignment, how much traffic to accommodate, how much to spend and what it will look like.

The state intends to write financial incentives into the contract to make the compressed schedule more likely to be met.

Similar incentives helped traffic began moving in December on one of the parallel three-mile Interstate 10 bridges over Escambia Bay in Pensacola, Fla. The $242 million project is replacing bridges damaged by 2004's Hurricane Ivan.

As suppliers are being asked to free up steel, rebar and other key components, state transportation officials warn other projects may languish if a new bridge is to be standing by the end of 2008.

The bridge's design will largely determine the cost, and although the federal government has pledged $250 million, Mahmoud said $300 million to $350 million "sounds about right."

Minnesota's winter weather will unquestionably pose a challenge to fast-track bridge building, said Dave Semerad, spokesman for the Associated General Contractors of Minnesota in St. Paul.

"There will be barges required for this construction, and a lot depends on the temperature," he said. "If the river freezes, then you're not going to be able to have barges moving around."

A helicopter with a camera mounted in its nose on Monday made slow sweeps as low as 30 feet above the wreckage of a freeway bridge collapse to take pictures of the debris in precise detail.

In the twisted wreckage that spans the Mississippi River, the search for victims is moving away from the edges and into the center of the debris, reports CBS News correspondent Bianca Solorzano.

"We do believe there are additional vehicles under the tons and tons and tons of concrete," said Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek.

A mass for one of the five known victims, exercise therapist Patrick Holmes, was held Monday morning, and memorial services are planned Tuesday for marketing director Sherry Engebretsen and truck driver Paul Eickstadt.

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[nothappyatall]

Oh, and by the way red, your loving merciful god caused the deaths of millions to the plague;

The total number of deaths worldwide from the pandemic is estimated at 75 million people; there were an estimated 20 million deaths in Europe alone. The Black Death is estimated to have killed between a third and two-thirds of Europe's population.

The plague disease, caused by Yersinia pestis, is enzootic in populations of ground rodents in central Asia.

In the years 1315 to 1322 a catastrophic famine, known as the Great Famine, struck all of Northern Europe.

===
WHO created ground rodents who harbored the plague I wonder... some loving god you got there red- killed more than Christian Hitler, Stalin and Mao together.

[nothappyatall]

The second world war;

Most historians and these books agree that the death toll was about 50 million (including wartime atrocities).

# Haywood: Atlas of World History (1997): 50M
# Keegan, J., The Second World War (1989): 50M
# Messenger, The Chronological Atlas of World War Two (1989): 50M
# The Times Concise Atlas of World History (1988): 50M
# J.M. Roberts, Twentieth Century (1999): 50M

Rummel:

* European War Dead (1939-45): 28,736,000
* Sino-Japanese War Dead (1937-45): 7,140,000
* War-related Democides
o Hitler: 20,946,000 (Christian)
o Stalin: 13,053,000
o Japanese: 5,964,000
o Chinese Nationalist: 5,907,000
o Allied Bombing: 796,000
o Croatian: 655,000
o Tito: 600,000
o Romanian domestic democide: 484,000
o Chinese Communist: 250,000
o Hungarian democide in Yugoslavia: 78,000
o [TOTAL: 48,733,000]

Brzezinski:
* Military: 19M
* Civilians, "actual byproduct of hostilities": 20M
* Civilians, Sino-Japanese War: 15M
* (CHRISTIAN) Hitler's murders: 17M

[nothappyatall]

"But I do not think that when he spoke on July 2, 1959, he knew how bad the disaster had become, and he believed the party was doing everything it could to manage the situation"

Given the lengthy gaps between the censuses and doubts over the reliability of the data, an accurate figure is difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless, Banister concluded that the official data implied that around 15 million excess deaths incurred in China during 1958-61

DRUMROLL red164.......

THE ~OFFICIAL~ STATISTIC is; 20 million deaths, as given by Hu Yaobang

Better do a little more research into who else was involved in all that grain shortage, and what the real numbers were before spouting off impossibly off the scale figures like 70 million

[nothappyatall]

And HERE Is the cause of most of those deaths;

Under the Great Leap Forward, Mao and other party leaders ordered the implementation of a variety of unproven and unscientific new agricultural techniques by the new communes. Combined with the diversion of labour to steel production and infrastructure projects and the reduced personal incentives under a commune system this led to an approximately 15% drop in grain production in 1959 followed by further 10% reduction in 1960 and no recovery in 1961.

In an effort to win favour with their superiors, each layer in the party hierarchy exaggerated the amount of grain produced under them and based on the fabricated success, party cadres were ordered to requisition a disproportionately high amount of the true harvest for state use primarily in the cities and urban areas but also for export. The net result, which was compounded in some areas by drought and in others by floods, was that the rural peasants were not left enough to eat and many millions starved to death in what is thought to be the largest famine in human history. This famine was a direct cause of the death of tens of millions of Chinese peasants between 1959 and 1962

According to some, most notably Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao was not aware of anything more than a mild food and general supply shortage until late 1959.

[nothappyatall]

Dearest Red, you keep playing NUMBERS games here, whether it's 6 millon, 23 million or 47 million is not the point- ONE is too many, ONE person killed by a CHRISTIAN is too many! You keep throwing out humongously impossible numbers like 70 million and that is an impossible number, we don't even know how many jews died under Christian Hitler, except toestimate aproximately 6 million, it could have been 10 million or 3 million- we'll never know.

Mao is held in high regard in China where he is often portrayed as a great revolutionary leader and a military and political genius who led China through the War of Resistance and the Civil War, and transformed the country into a major power through his Maoist social and economic reforms. However, many of Mao's policies and socio-political programmes such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are blamed by critics from both within and outside China for causing severe damage to the culture, society, economy and foreign relations of China, as well as enormous and unnecessary loss of lives, claiming that the total number of lives lost ranged from 40,000,000 to 78,860,000 people.

The keyword is "unnecessary" deaths, not direct executions per Christian Hitler

[red164]

Yeah red, I understand all too well!


Posted by newster1 at 08:35 PM : Aug 07, 2007

No you don't so here it is one more time. Stalin and Mao killed over 70 million of their own citizens 70 million and both men were "Atheist%u2019s".

Don't reply

[nothappyatall]

." St. Bernard announced before the Second Crusade that "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified."

And THIS red164 is the history of YOUR religion- sick twisted hypocrites, and this guy was a SAINT, a real shame one of the sweetest dog breeds around has the name sake of a monster like that.

Now, that's all I have to say on THIS, unless of course you desire to continue the mini bibull sermonettes in here again.

The arch in the bridge designs goes back to Roman times and older, the Roman aqueducts were built with series of arches, they still stand.
---
Now, back to the bridge design;

The arch is basically a catenary curve, this page may help people understand the physics of an arch, and why a high arch v/s a low rise arch present very different problems and strengths, and why one puts less stress on the two "ends" than the other
you will have to copy/paste the munged url into one line with no spaces - look half way down for the arch photo with the blue background;

www.cpo.com/Weblabs/chap3/archf.htm

See also; www.howstuffworks.com/bridge5.htm

[nothappyatall]

Yeah red, I understand all too well!

When Muslim cities were captured by Christian crusaders, it was standard operating procedure for all inhabitants - no matter what their age - to be summarily killed.Jews who took refuge in their synagogues would be burned alive.
In his reports about the conquest of Jerusalem, Chronicler Raymond of Aguilers wrote that "It was a just and marvelous judgment of God, that this place [the temple of Solomon] should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers." St. Bernard announced before the Second Crusade that "The Christian glories in the death of a pagan, because thereby Christ himself is glorified."

soldiers asked papal legate Arnald Amalric how to tell the faithful apart from the infidels. He uttered his famous words: "Kill them all. God will know His own." Such depths of contempt and hatred are truly frightening, but they are only possible in the context of a religious doctrine of eternal punishment for unbelievers and eternal reward for believers.

[nothappyatall]

Yeah I understand red, I understand;

One of the most famous examples of religious violence in the Middle Ages is of course the Crusades - attempts by European Christians to impose their vision of religion upon Jews, Orthodox Christians, heretics, Muslims, and just about anyone else who happened to get in the way

Emich's followers decided that before they traveled across Europe to kill God's enemies, it would be a good idea to eliminate the infidels in their midst. Thus suitably motivated, they proceeded to massacre the Jews in German cities like Mainz and Worms. Thousands of defenseless men, women and children were burned or otherwise slaughtered.

This sort of action was not an isolated event, it was repeated throughout Europe by all sorts of crusading hordes. The Jews were given a last-minute chance to convert to Christianity in accord with Augustine's doctrines. When Peter the Hermit's army entered Yugoslavia, 4,000 Christian residents of the city of Zemun were massacred before they moved on to burn Belgrade.

[red164]

Posted by newster1 at 01:45 PM : Aug 07, 2007

Joseph Stalin
Religion/Belief: Atheism

Just days before Stalin's death, certain religious sects were outlawed and persecuted.

Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.


Okay now do you understand? BYE