Uncle of Florida bridge collapse victim rages at ‘incompetence’
MIAMI — As crews began removing bodies from beneath a collapsed pedestrian bridge Saturday, 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 in Thursday’s collapse at Florida International University. “Then they decided to stress test this bridge while traffic was running underneath it?”
Authorities say six people were killed when the structure fell onto a busy six-lane road connecting the campus to the community of Sweetwater. Crews removed two cars Saturday morning and said they found three bodies, but officials said there were still at least two more victims beneath the rubble. Late in the day they recovered a third car, and Saturday night they said they believed all victims had been found.
The Miami-Dade Police Department confirmed the names of four victims Saturday.
Rolando Fraga Hernandez and his gold Jeep Cherokee were pulled from the wreckage Saturday. Later, the bodies of Oswald Gonzalez, 57, and Alberto Arias, 54, were found inside a white Chevy truck.
Navarro Brown was pulled from the rubble Thursday and later died at the hospital.
Authorities have not released Duran’s name, but her family has said she died. The FIU freshman was studying political science.
The National Transportation Safety Board has confirmed that crews were applying what’s known as “post-tensioning force” on the bridge before the failure. Authorities are investigating whether cracking that was reported just before the span fell contributed to the accident.
Experts interviewed by The Associated Press were mixed on the significance of those reported cracks.
Amjad Aref, a professor with the University of Buffalo’s Institute of Bridge Engineering, said they should have been “a big red flag.”
“Bridges are really very vulnerable when they are under construction, when there are just pieces,” he said. “It’s like still a flimsy structure. And when you see cracks, somebody has to raise really a big flag and say, ‘We need to do something. We need to figure out what’s happening quickly and do any mitigating actions to prevent further progression of damage and ultimately collapse,’ as we saw here.”
But Ralph Verrastro, principle of Naples-based Bridging Solutions, was not surprised to hear about cracks, and said it was not necessarily a problem.
“Any bridge with concrete, that’s made of concrete, there’s always cracks,” said Verrastro, who has been an engineer for 42 years. “If they had concerns that something was going on for that main span, then they would have called the sheriff or the police and closed the road. I would be very surprised if it’s determined that they were taking a chance and trying to do something under traffic. It’s just, as bridge engineers, that’s just never done.”
Two days before the collapse, an engineer with the design firm left a voicemail 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. In a transcript released Friday night, Denney Pate with FIGG Bridge Group said the cracking would need repairs but the company didn’t think it was a safety issue.
University officials, however, said Saturday that DOT officials had been aware of the cracking before the collapse. They said in a statement that representatives of FIU 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.