MINNEAPOLIS – A plan to replace the bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River last week is on the fastest of fast tracks: State officials want the span open by the end of next year, and contractors interested in the job must contact the state by dawn Wednesday.
State officials have an ambitious schedule to award contracts to replace the bridge next month, even as search crews remained stymied in their efforts to recover at least eight missing victims from the depths of the Mississippi River. Five people are confirmed dead.
A brutal winter could throw the state’s rapid reconstruction schedule off. 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.”
It took only seconds Wednesday night for the eight-lane Interstate 35W bridge, which opened in 1967, to collapse. Three days later, the state had already begun looking for companies interested in erecting a new bridge in just 16 months.
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 new 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.”
Federal money for emergency reconstruction of the bridge is primarily meant for replacement of what was lost, along with some reasonable accommodation for increased traffic, said Bob McFarlin, spokesman for Minnesota’s transportation department.
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 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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