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| The pedestrian bridge that collapsed in Miami had only been installed over the weekend (AFP Photo/Antoni BELCHI) |
Miami (AFP) - The chief engineer of a Florida bridge project warned authorities of cracking in the structure days before it collapsed, killing at least six people, the southern US state's department of transportation said Friday.
Chief
engineer Denney Pate left a voicemail on a Florida Department of Transportation
employee's landline on March 13, two days before the pedestrian walkway came
crashing down on the major road beneath, the department said in a statement.
The
voicemail -- which was not heard until Friday because the employee it was left
for was out of the office -- mentioned a problem, but did not warn that
structural failure was imminent.
There was
"some cracking that's been observed on the north end of the span,"
Pate said, according to a transcript of the call.
"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," Pate said.
At least
eight cars were trapped when the 950-ton (tonne) bridge suddenly gave way on
Thursday, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Division Chief Paul Estopinan said.
The
walkway, which connected Florida International University to a student housing
area, had been raised less than a week ago but was not expected to be
operational until 2019.
Death
toll could rise
Miami-Dade
county police spokesman Alvaro Zabaleta told reporters that on Friday rescue
operations shifted to one of body recovery, with engineers fearing the support
structures at either end of the bridge could also come down.
"The
entire bridge is in jeopardy," Zabaleta said.
Juan Perez,
director of the Miami-Dade police department later told reporters that a team
of government prosecutors was on the scene as part of the investigation, but
stressed it was too soon to say whether criminal charges would be brought.
"It is important that we understand, this is a homicide investigation. That's all it is," he said. "That means that somebody died... It does not mean there (are) criminal charges looming or pending or anything like that."
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Emergency
personnel searched for victims at the scene of a bridge collapse in
Miami (AFP
Photo/Miguel GUTIERREZ)
|
"It is important that we understand, this is a homicide investigation. That's all it is," he said. "That means that somebody died... It does not mean there (are) criminal charges looming or pending or anything like that."
The death
toll meanwhile was likely to go up when authorities extracted and identified
the remains of victims in vehicles trapped under the rubble, Perez said.
Ten people
were taken to hospital after the bridge collapse, Zabaleta said.
Video
footage showed the concrete structure suddenly crashing onto the road below.
Police
detective Juan Carlos Llera said when the bridge came down, it "sounded
like an explosion. A huge bang."
"It
looks like a disaster area. It looks literally like a bomb went off,"
Llera told AFP.
Miami Fire
Chief Dave Downey emphasized there was no hope of finding survivors.
Loose
cables
The bridge
was suspended from cables which came loose, and while they were being tightened
the whole thing collapsed, Florida Senator Marco Rubio wrote on Twitter.
The
university had just celebrated the walkway's construction, which bridges a busy
and dangerous section of highway that students said had been the scene of
accidents.
It was
raised using an accelerated modular building method that enabled the bridge to
go up in the space of a day.
FIGG
Engineering Group, one of the partners involved in the walkway's construction,
said it was "stunned" by the bridge collapse, and vowed in a
statement to "fully cooperate with every appropriate authority in
reviewing what happened and why."
Munilla
Construction Management, which was also involved, issued a statement of
condolence. Bridge collapses in the United States are rare despite rising risks
associated with aging infrastructure.
The
deadliest such incident this century was in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2007, when
an eight-lane bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people.
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