2 cars, 3 bodies pulled from collapsed Miami span debris
MIAMI — Two vehicles with three bodies inside were removed from the wreckage of a collapsed bridge Saturday as authorities continued to remove debris in attempt to extract at least four cars still trapped since the span fell two days earlier in Miami.
The recovery came after police used cameras to locate five bodies in the rubble of a pedestrian bridge under construction at Florida International University. Authorities said there were still at least two more bodies beneath the rubble. At least six people were killed when the structure fell onto a highway Thursday.
“Right now we’re just chipping away,” said Miami-Dade Police Director Juan Perez.
Perez said DNA evidence, fingerprints and family photos might be needed to identify the victims.
Authorities are continuing to investigate the collapse and whether cracking that was reported before the span fell contributed to the bridge failure.
An engineer left a voicemail two days before the collapse to say some cracking had been found at one end of the concrete span, but the voicemail wasn’t picked up until after the collapse, Florida Department of Transportation officials said Friday.
The voicemail wasn’t heard by a state DOT employee until Friday because the employee was out on an assignment, the agency said in an email.
In a transcript released Friday night, Denney Pate with FIGG Bridge Group says the cracking would need repairs “but from a safety perspective we don’t see that there’s any issue there so we’re not concerned about it from that perspective.”
On Saturday, FIU released a statement saying representatives from the university and DOT met with a FIGG engineer for two hours Thursday to discuss the cracking and determined there wasn’t a safety issue. The bridge fell soon afterward.
On Friday night, officials from the National Transportation Safety Board said they cannot yet say whether any cracking contributed to the collapse. They also said workers were trying to strengthen a diagonal member on the bridge when it collapsed.
The cables supporting the span were being tightened following a “stress test” when it collapsed, authorities said.
The Florida DOT said Friday that it had not been notified of any stress test.
A victim’s uncle raged against what he called the “complete incompetence” and “colossal failure” that allowed people to drive beneath the unfinished concrete span.
“Why they had to build this monstrosity in the first place to get children across the street?” said an anguished Joe Smitha, whose niece, Alexa Duran, was crushed. “Then they decided to stress test this bridge while traffic was running underneath it?”
Scheduled to open in 2019, the bridge would have provided safe passage over a canal and six lanes of traffic and created a showpiece architectural feature connecting the campus of FIU with the community of Sweetwater, where many students live.
The $14.2 million project was supposed to take advantage of a faster, cheaper and safer method of bridgebuilding promoted by the university.
Authorities have not confirmed the victims’ names. The fatalities included an FIU student. One person died at a hospital.