Minnesota sets ambitious goal for bridge fix

Brutal weather to pose a challenge
Minnesota’s brutal 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.”

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.

Divers continue recovery operation
At the disaster site Monday, weary dive teams were getting reinforcements to help in the slow search: Navy divers had arrived and FBI dive teams were on the way with powerful technology, including a robotic submarine. Heavy equipment also was moving into place to begin removing the tons of debris lying across the Mississippi.

Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek said that divers had done about all they could and that clearing out the tangle of twisted steel and broken concrete may be the only way to find any of the missing.

John L. Sanders, director of the Ohio-based National Underwater Rescue Recovery Institute, said it’s not surprising that the missing haven’t been found yet. Some may have been able to partially escape their vehicles, then been swept downstream. They could be trapped in tangles of rebar or pinned in vehicles by seat belts and air bags, or by debris, he said.

Also Monday, an attorney for the company that had been resurfacing the bridge declined to comment on a report that some workers said they had felt the bridge wobbling unusually in the days before the collapse. The NTSB has said the report will be part of its investigation.

Progressive Contractors Inc. “continues to believe that its work did not cause the collapse,” attorney David Lillehaug said in an e-mail.

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