Minn. searchers turn to Navy By MARK SCOLFORO, Associated Press Writer

Minn. searchers turn to Navy By MARK SCOLFORO, Associated Press Writer
10 minutes ago



MINNEAPOLIS - After five exhausting days searching for victims of an interstate bridge collapse, rescue coordinators are turning to the U.S. Navy divers considered the best.

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Local dive teams have yet to recover the eight people missing and believed dead in last Wednesday's disaster, in part because of dangerously unstable wreckage.

"Now it's time to start going through the debris," Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek said. "My folks are not salvage experts, and that's why I brought in the ones that are, the Navy."

FBI dive teams had also arrived to join in the search, with technology that includes a small submarine equipped with a robotic arm. Meanwhile, work had begun to move heavy equipment into position to eventually hoist away the tons of concrete and steel left by the collapse.

The Navy said it would not have a spokesman available to talk about its role here until Tuesday.

In addition to the missing, there are five known dead. Five victims also remain hospitalized in critical condition.

As the recovery effort enters a new stage, teams of designers and builders are racing to meet a dawn Wednesday deadline for showing they are qualified to bid on the bridge replacement project, which the state has put on a fast track.

State transportation officials hope to award contracts next month, with the goal of having a new Interstate 35W bridge standing at the end of 2008.

A severe winter could throw off the state's reconstruction schedule. But other conditions are favorable — including a construction industry with plenty of available resources to take on such a daunting challenge.

"It is doable. It is a bit fast, but this is an emergency," said Khaled Mahmoud with the Bridge Engineering Association in New York. "And if we are ever good at anything, it's responding to emergencies."

Erecting a new bridge like Minneapolis' would ordinarily take about three years, even if the design and building phases were overlapped to save time, said Bill Cox, owner of Corman Construction Inc. in Annapolis Junction, Md., a road and bridge construction firm.

The goal of awarding contracts in mid-September is highly ambitious given the array of questions to be answered, including whether to mimic the former bridge's alignment, how much traffic to accommodate, how much to spend and what it will look like.

The state intends to write financial incentives into the contract to make the compressed schedule more likely to be met.

Similar incentives helped traffic began moving in December on one of the parallel three-mile Interstate 10 bridges over Escambia Bay in Pensacola, Fla. The $242 million project is replacing bridges damaged by 2004's Hurricane Ivan.

As suppliers are being asked to free up steel, rebar and other key components, state transportation officials warn other projects may languish if a new bridge is to be standing by the end of 2008.

The bridge's design will largely determine the cost, and although the federal government has pledged $250 million, Mahmoud said $300 million to $350 million "sounds about right."

Minnesota's winter weather will unquestionably pose a challenge to fast-track bridge building, said Dave Semerad, spokesman for the Associated General Contractors of Minnesota in St. Paul.

"There will be barges required for this construction, and a lot depends on the temperature," he said. "If the river freezes, then you're not going to be able to have barges moving around."

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Associated Press writers Brian Bakst and Doug Glass contributed to this report.