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Recovery Efforts to Begin in I-35W Bridge Collapse
Portions of collapsed Minneapolis highway to be removed
By Design News Staff -- Design News, August 6, 2007
Check in with our I-35W bridge collapse coverage page for the latest news, videos and photos covering the failure.
The NTSB has given the go ahead to begin recovery efforts following last Wednesday’s collapse of the I35W bridge in Minneapolis, MN. Cranes, being brought in to remove the portions of the highway collapse, are being put in place as early as today.
St. Paul contractor, Carl Bolander and Sons will be heading up the debris recovery starting with four cranes, one placed on each bank of the river, one on a barge in the river and one to unload from the barge. Other resources from the FBI and Navy, including sonar, may be used in the recovery, according to Mary McFarland, media contact for MN/DOT. A representative from Carl Bolander and Sons said they were not able to comment.
“We’ve gotten what we can from the wreckage as it lays and they can begin recovery,” says NTSB Spokesperson Ted Lopatkiewicz, adding that the NTSB will continue to be involved in the process. “We are going to be there while they are recovering, and if there is anything that looks of interest to us, we will ask them to stop long enough to document what we need.”
“I think we’ll see them beginning to narrow down the part of the bridge where they think the collapse may have initiated,” says Gene Corley, senior vice president of CTLGroup and an expert in structural engineering and evaluation. “NTSB will be reviewing plans, all of the inspection reports and everything else connected with the bridge to try to help them, to point them in the direction of what they should be looking for. Then once they have that narrowed down they’ll start removing pieces of the bridge that they believe might have been in the vicinity of where the collapse started and at the same time the have this computer analysis that they will put together and try to simulate the collapse and see what member or members need to be removed to get it to come down in a way similar to the way it really came down.”
According to Corley the collapsed roadway has to be unstacked the way it fell because it’s difficult to know how it is supported at the moment. “Part of it’s undoubtedly buried in the mud of the river and just very difficult to even understand how it’s being supported,” he says, “Probably their safest way of doing it is to find those pieces that they feel will not dislodge anything else when they remove them and start from the top down.”
NTSB officials, including Chairman Mark Rosenker, suggested the total time for the investigation into what caused the collapse will take between one to one and a half years before they reach a finding.
Lopatkiewicz says he can’t put a firm time on it. “There’s no way for us to tell that yet, with the wreckage still in the river,” he says. For a mater of comparison, Lopatkiewicz mentioned the investigation into Boston’s Big Dig ceiling tunnel collapse which killed a woman last summer when the car she was traveling in was crushed by a falling ceiling tile panel. “Our chairman said it took us about five months to get a good handle of what had happened there and that was an area of a couple of hundred feet of a tunnel ceiling to look at, in this case we’re looking at about a quarter mile of a bridge,” he says.
Also over the weekend, the injury and death tolls were more accurately accounted, with five confirmed dead and eight still reported missing. Congress approved $250 million for bridge rebuilding efforts, which Governor Tim Pawlenty says will cost as much as $350 million.
The Associated Press is reporting clean up of the bridge will cost approximately $15 million, and government officials have suggested the bridge will be rebuilt by the end of 2008.
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