Bodies removed from bridge wreckage
Two vehicles containing three bodies were removed from the wreckage of a collapsed Miami 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.
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 were carefully trying to get to remaining victims. At least six people were killed when the structure fell onto a busy 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.
Meanwhile authorities are continuing to investigate the collapse and whether cracking that was reported just 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 left on a landline wasn’t heard by a state DOT employee until Friday because the employee was out of the office 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 morning to discuss the cracking and determined there wasn’t a safety issue. The bridge fell soon afterward.
“The FIGG engineer of record delivered a technical presentation regarding the crack and concluded that there were no safety concerns and the crack did not compromise the structural integrity of the bridge,” FIU said.
At a news conference Friday night, officials from the National Transportation Safety Board said they have just begun their investigation, and 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.
Robert Accetta, the investigator-in-charge for the NTSB, said crews were applying post-tensioning force, but investigators aren’t sure if that’s what caused the bridge to fall.
In a news release late Friday, FIGG Bridge Engineers said it “continues to work diligently” to determine the cause of the collapse, and is examining the steps its team has taken. It added, “The evaluation was based on the best available information at that time and indicated that there were no safety issues.” It also asked for time to accurately determine what led to the accident.
A college student who narrowly escaped from a car that got smashed in the collapse said he watched helplessly as the structure tumbled down atop the vehicle and killed his friend Alexa Duran, who was sitting next to him in the driver’s seat.
Richie Humble, who studies at FIU, was riding in a car under the pedestrian bridge when he heard a long creaking noise coming from the structure that spanned a busy Miami-area highway. It sounded different from anything he had ever heard before.
“I looked up, and in an instant, the bridge was collapsing on us completely. It was too quick to do anything about it,” Humble said Friday in a phone interview with The Associated Press.
Once Humble realized he was alive, he also realized that he could not get to Duran. He called to her but got no response. A group of men outside the car started yelling at him to try crawling through the rear window.
He couldn’t squeeze through because the window was crushed. The men outside grabbed a wooden plank and pried open the rear door to pull him free, he said.