Bridge Collapse Search Continues
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.
It's not surprising that eight missing motorists have not yet been located, says John L. Sanders, director of the Ohio-based National Underwater Rescue Recovery Institute, who has worked on over 600 drowning cases.
Sanders says some may have been able to escape from their vehicles but were then swept downstream. Another possibility, he says, is that victims could be trapped in tangles of steel reinforcing rod or pinned in vehicles by debris or by seat belts and air bags.
Commuters found ways of getting to work in downtown without the major freeway.
"Overall, I'm pretty encouraged by this morning's commute," said Don Zenanko, a state transportation specialist who works in the metro area's Regional Transportation Management Center.
He said it appeared that most commuters left early for work on Monday, and followed the traffic updates flashed on overhead signs.
"I think we have the tools in place so that most of the motoring public can get through this without too much interruption of their daily lives," he said.
The bridge had carried up to 140,000 vehicles a day before it fell in the river Wednesday evening during rush hour.
More than 100 people were injured when vehicles from the bridge tumbled into the swift current and onto broken concrete.
National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Mark Rosenker said the city has been given permission for a contractor to begin removing the bridge remnants, a long and costly process that will begin with the staging of four cranes and then the start to the removal.
Solorzano reports investigators will use that wreckage to reconstruct conditions at the bridge at the time of the collapse. They'll also examine the weight on the bridge, the number of cars, even the weather.
"It will be tough work but also sensitive work," Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak said Monday on CBS News' The Early Show.
Sunday was a day of prayer for the dead and missing. An estimated 1,400 people filled St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral for an interfaith service, marking what Gov. Tim Pawlenty described as the start of the healing period.
"We're here to begin the process of restoration," he said.
The Rev. Peg Chemberlin, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Churches, told the crowd that though they came in "shared anger and anguish," the city had rallied in crisis.
"It's important that we stand together and say, 'Minnesota, your heart is full of courage and compassion,"' she said. "The heroes in this moment, like the tears, are many."
The NTSB said it could take as long as 18 months to complete its investigation into why Minnesota's busiest bridge collapsed. It will use high-tech software to simulate removing key support structures to see how the bridge reacts.
"If they remove a piece and it falls down the way they saw it, that's a pretty good indication they found the right piece, and there's all sorts of ways of doing that," said W. Gene Corley, senior vice president of CTL Group, an engineering firm.
Corley, who has helped investigate bridge collapses, as well as disasters such as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City federal building, predicted federal officials would have a pretty good idea of the cause within a few weeks.
Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith asked Mayor Rybak if he has any better sense how this tragedy happened.
"We don't, and I'm troubled by that," said Rybak. "I think we certainly want the investigation of this to go on, but to tell you the truth, as one of the mayors of this country who's been trying for along time to call attention to our infrastructure, what's going to be next? Is it going to be (a) failing drinking water system, one of our public housing buildings that have been so underinvested in?
"Stop and think about what this means when a bridge falls down in rush hour in a major American city. People across this country rightfully have a reason to ask whether we have our priorities straight."
State officials said they hope to be able to have the bridge rebuilt by the end of 2008. Pawlenty said Sunday the cost could be as high as $350 million. The cleanup is expected to cost as much as $15 million.