Engineers
and state and university officials met hours before a newly built
pedestrian bridge collapsed, killing six people, but concluded that a
crack in the bridge was not a safety concern, Florida International
University said yesterday.
The two-hour meeting on Thursday involved
FIGG, which is the private contractor for the overall design of the
bridge, the school, Florida Department of Transportation officials and
Munilla Construction Management (MCM), which installed the bridge.
A
FIGG engineer “concluded there were no safety concerns and the crack did
not compromise the structural integrity of the bridge,” FIU said in a
statement yesterday.
About three hours after the meeting concluded,
the 950-tonne, $14.2mn bridge fell down, crushing vehicles stopped at a
traffic light on the eight-lane roadway below.
At least six people, including three whose bodies were recovered yesterday, were killed.
Police said four vehicles are believed to be still under the collapsed bridge and more bodies may be recovered from the rubble.
News
of the meeting followed a revelation late on Friday that the engineer
overseeing the bridge, which linked the FIU campus with the city of
Sweetwater, had called a state official two days before the collapse to
report cracks.
However, the voicemail message from FIGG’s lead
engineer Denney Pate, including his assertion that the cracking posed no
safety issue, was not retrieved until Friday, a day after the tragedy,
according to the state transportation agency.
Pate did not immediately respond to email queries from Reuters.
In
the message, Pate said his team had observed “some cracking” at one end
of the bridge and that repairs were warranted, “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.”
He added: “Obviously the cracking is not good and something’s going to have to be, ya know, done to repair that.”
International / US/Latin America
Florida school says it was aware of bridge cracks before fatal collapse
An aerial view of a pedestrian bridge that collapsed at Florida International University in Miami on Thursday.