Engineer of FIU Designed Bridge Reported Cracks Days Before Collapse

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/us/florida-bridge-cracks.html

MIAMI — An engineer reported cracks on a newly installed pedestrian bridge
two days before it collapsed on a busy roadway here, killing at least six
people, state officials said on Friday.

The report, by the lead engineer with the company in charge of the
bridge’s design, was made in a voice mail message left for a Florida
Department of Transportation employee. That employee was out of the
office, however, and did not receive it until Friday, a day after the
collapse.

The cracking was on the north end of the span but the company did not
consider it a safety concern, according to a recording of the message
released by the Transportation Department.

“We’ve taken a look at it and, uh, obviously some repairs or whatever will
have to be done, 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,”
said the engineer, W. Denney Pate. “Although obviously the cracking is not
good and something’s going to have to be, you know, done to repair that.”

The transportation department said on Friday that “the responsibility to
identify and address life-safety issues and properly communicate them is
the sole responsibility of the F.I.U. design-build team,” referring to
Florida International University, which commissioned the bridge.

In a statement, Figg Bridge Engineers, which designed the bridge, said
that it was “heartbroken by the loss of life and injuries, and are
carefully examining the steps that our team has taken in the interest of
our overarching concern for public safety.”

“The evaluation was based on the best available information at that time
and indicated that there were no safety issues,” the statement said. “It
is important that the agencies responsible for investigating this
devastating situation are given the appropriate time in order to
accurately identify what factors led to the accident during construction.”

Earlier on Friday, the authorities in Miami-Dade County announced that
they had called off the search for survivors. Officials were now turning
their attention to finding out exactly why the new bridge — hailed as a
breakthrough in speedy, safe construction — had given way over the road
beneath, killing at least half a dozen people and sending 10 more to
hospitals.

As a backhoe slowly lifted the rubble off cars, some of them with bodies
still inside, investigators said they were only beginning to consider
possible failures of engineering, construction and traffic planning.

What role, if any, that cracks played in the collapse has yet to be
determined. “A crack in a bridge does not necessarily mean it’s unsafe,”
said Robert Accetta, an official of the National Transportation Safety
Board, which is investigating the accident, said at a news conference
Friday night. The N.T.S.B. chairman, Robert Sumwalt, said the board has
not yet determined on its own if there were cracks.

Construction crews were tightening cables on the bridge when it fell, the
N.T.S.B. said, which is not unusual after installation. Mr. Accetta said
the safety board also would look at whether that process contributed to
the collapse, adding that the “point of failure” was still unclear.

But the possibility that cracks had occurred and had been communicated
only via voice mail was sure to become a focus of scrutiny and of finger-
pointing.

Two days after the voice mail message was left, and one day before it was
heard, the Florida Department of Transportation said, one of its
consultants took part in a meeting with the bridge’s design and
construction team. At the meeting the state consultant “was not notified
of any life-safety issues, need for additional road closures or requests
for any other assistance from FDOT,” the department said.

The meeting took place at noon on Thursday. At around 1:30 p.m., the
bridge collapsed.

“At no point during any of the communications above did Figg or any member
of the F.I.U. design-build team ever communicate a life-safety issue,” the
state Transportation Department said in its statement.

Another major question is whether Southwest Eighth Street, the busy
thoroughfare below the walkway, should have been open when the walkway was
undergoing crucial adjustments. The state transportation agency said it
had received no requests to close the road.

None of the victims had been officially identified Friday night, possibly
because their bodies were still buried in their cars. But family members
of several missing people feared the worst.

Alexa Duran and her friend, Richard Humble, both F.I.U. students, had been
stopped in a Toyota 4Runner under the bridge because of a red light ahead.

The concrete overhead creaked. Mr. Humble looked up, and saw the structure
falling. It crushed the car and squashed his neck, trapping him inside.

“I thought when I saw the bridge coming down that I was dead,” he told NBC
News.

Passers-by freed him. But Ms. Duran, a freshman who lived at home and was
close with her parents, often pressing shirts at the family’s dry cleaning
business, did not make it out.

“She was an angel,” her father, Orlando Duran, said by phone from London,
where he was traveling for work, before he got on a plane back to the
United States. “She wanted to become a lawyer, and she was so beautiful.”

An online fund-raiser for the family of another missing man, Brandon
Brownfield, had raised more than $20,000 by Friday evening.

“We have not received word about his whereabouts or his medical
condition,” Chelsea Brownfield, Mr. Brownfield’s wife, said in an
interview. The fund-raiser page said they have three daughters.

The $14 million walkway, which was to carry F.I.U. students and other
pedestrians over Southwest Eighth Street, was built using “accelerated
construction,” a well-regarded method of erecting bridges that avoids the
long months of street closings when a structure is built over a road or
river. Instead, parts of the bridge are prefabricated away from the site
and then moved into place.

Bridges made using the accelerated techniques are not more at risk of
collapse than others, but moving them into place causes different stresses
than what the bridge would normally have to withstand, said Andy Herrmann,
a former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Mr. Accetta said that the N.T.S.B. had not previously had to investigate
an accident involving this kind of bridge. “This is a different design
type of bridge,” he said. “It’s not something that we’ve encountered
before.”

The cables being tightened were at the north end of the bridge, the same
end where the cracking was reported on the voice mail message, and the
same end where the collapse appeared to begin, based on a widely
circulated video of the accident.

“Just preliminary, it appears that way, but we still have a lot of work to
do,” Mr. Accetta said.

An executive at a construction company that was working on the bridge
confirmed on Friday that one of his employees had been killed and two
others hospitalized.

Mike Biesiada, the chief sales and marketing officer for the company,
Structural Technologies, said the employee who died was Navaro Brown, 37.
“We look forward to learning the cause of the accident so that it’s not
repeated ever again,” Mr. Biesiada said.

The bridge designers, builders and inspectors were all well-known and
influential firms. Figg, based in Tallahassee, has designed a number of
significant bridges in the United States, including one on Interstate 35W
in Minneapolis that replaced a section that collapsed in 2007, and the
iconic Sunshine Skyway Bridge over the mouth of Tampa Bay.

In response to questions on Friday, the company said that “no other bridge
designed by Figg Bridge Engineers has ever experienced such a collapse.”
But a 90-ton segment of a bridge across the Elizabeth River in Virginia
collapsed during construction in 2012, leaving four workers with minor
injuries. The company was fined $9,800 by the state, according to federal
records.

The main builder of the F.I.U. bridge, Munilla Construction Management,
specializes in roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects, and has a
$63.5 million contract with the United States Navy to build a school on
the naval base at Guantánamo Bay. It was founded by brothers who were
Cuban refugees and whose father, the firm says, owned a construction
company in Cuba that was confiscated by Fidel Castro.

The company is known for having close relations with and donating to local
politicians. A spokesman on Friday declined to comment on the bridge
collapse, saying that “due to N.T.S.B. investigation requirements, we will
not be able to address any questions pertaining to this construction
project.”

The bridge had been a point of pride for F.I.U., which has a center
devoted to accelerated bridge construction and hosted a “watch party” last
Saturday when the bridge was moved into place. The university did not
offer a public response Friday night regarding the report of cracks on the
bridge.

Earlier Friday, Mark B. Rosenberg, the university president, said that the
school was conducting its own investigation.

“Obviously, everybody is in shock here,” said Mr. Rosenberg, who had been
a public champion of the project. “We just want answers, and we’re going
to get answers.”

One of the first people to reach the accident site, Sgt. Jenna Mendez, who
was heading to work at the Sweetwater Police Department, recalled being
stunned as she saw the bridge fall about 300 feet in front of her.

Her first thought: Why would construction workers do such a thing?

“Obviously it was a collapse, but I couldn’t comprehend it,” she said on
Friday. “I was thinking: ‘Why did they just block all those lanes of
traffic?’”

Sergeant Mendez, 36, climbed to the top of the fallen bridge, where she
found four wounded construction workers.

The only shouting she remembered was her own: “I need rescue! I need
doctors!”

She started doing chest compressions on one man who was not breathing. A
motorist who said she was a doctor was guided by other drivers up the
heap, where she helped administer CPR.

Sergeant Mendez started crawling under the rubble to see if anyone was
trapped. She had momentarily forgotten about the grave danger of sliding
beneath a collapsed 950-ton bridge.

“Fire rescue started screaming: ‘What are you doing? Do not go under
that!’” she said. “Once I stepped back and looked, I realized: ‘There’s
nothing I can do, these cars are crushed.’”

She stayed at the scene until 10 p.m., went home and gave her children,
ages 21, 17, 13, 10 and 3, extra tight hugs, and took some melatonin to
help her sleep.

“I told my husband, ‘I don’t want to drive under a bridge anymore,’” she
said.


--
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