Missed call told of cracks on bridge before it fell

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 Friday that “the responsibility to identify and address life-safety issues and properly communicate them is the sole responsibility of the FIU 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 that it was carefully examining the steps that its team had 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 Friday, the authorities in Miami-Dade County announced that they had called off the search for survivors. Officials were 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 NTSB chairman, Robert Sumwalt, said the board had not yet determined on its own if there were cracks.

Construction crews were tightening cables on the bridge when it fell, the NTSB said, which is not unusual after installation. Accetta said the safety board 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 voicemail was sure to become a focus of scrutiny and of finger-pointing.

Two days after the voicemail 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 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 FIU 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 FIU students, had been stopped in a Toyota 4Runner under the bridge because of a red light ahead.

The concrete overhead creaked. 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 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 getting on a plane back to the United States. “She wanted to become a lawyer, and she was so beautiful.”

An online fundraiser 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, Brownfield’s wife, said in an interview. The fundraiser page said they have three daughters.

The $14 million walkway, which was to carry FIU 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.

Accetta said that the NTSB 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 voicemail 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,” Accetta said.

An executive at a construction company that was working on the bridge confirmed 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,” Biesiada said.

The bridge designers, builders and inspectors were all well-known and influential firms. Figg, based in Tallahassee, Florida, 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 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 FIU bridge, Munilla Construction Management, specializes in roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects, and has a $63.5 million contract with the U.S. 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 Friday declined to comment on the collapse, saying that “due to NTSB 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 FIU, 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 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 Friday. “I was thinking: ‘Why did they just block all those lanes of traffic?'”

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.

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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.