Florida bridge collapse: 'There are bodies down there and we can't get to them'

“We exhausted last night all of our search and rescue capabilities,” said Chief Dave Downey of the Miami-Dade County Fire Rescue Department, which deployed one of the nation’s most specialized rescue squadrons in the wake of the bridge’s collapse. “We’ve determined that there’s no longer any survivors.”

The National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation into the cause of the collapse of the 174-foot walkway, which was designed to connect the campus of Florida International University to the city of Sweetwater and had not yet opened to pedestrians.

The chairman of the safety board, Robert L. Sumwalt, said Friday that part of the inquiry would examine why there was not a central support beam to hold up the bridge. The NTSB’s investigation was poised to begin in earnest later Friday, once the recovery effort was expected to be completed. But the board is not likely to issue its final assessment for many months.

The collapse of the $14.2 million structure, built adjacent to the street using a method called accelerated bridge construction, came less than a week after it was driven into its perpendicular position across the road by a rig.

Accelerated construction is 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.

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.

On Friday, there was still conflicting information about what work, if any, was occurring on the bridge when it fell.

Mark B. Rosenberg, the university president, said Thursday that there had been testing underway, without being more specific. On Thursday night, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said on Twitter that the collapse happened as loose cables were being tightened. He learned of that detail from several workers at the site, his office said.

On Friday, authorities declined to answer questions about why the roadway under the bridge was not closed during testing, and Maurice Kemp, a deputy mayor of Miami-Dade County, said they had not even confirmed whether any testing was happening.

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

As federal and state officials took the first steps of a wide-ranging investigation that could prove a precursor to criminal charges, local authorities said they were focused on recovering the remains of those who died. At least eight cars are believed to be trapped under the remnants of the bridge.

The recovery effort, though, is complex and rife with perils. While emergency workers labored early Friday, a portion of the bridge that had remained suspended began to crumble when crews tried to move it, said Juan J. Perez, the county’s police director.

“The fact that we know that there are bodies down there and we can’t get to them, it’s just horrible,” he told WIOD, a South Florida radio station.

Perez said law enforcement would not release an updated number of fatalities until all remaining victims were pulled from the rubble. Some reports Thursday put the number of dead as high as 10.

Rosenberg emphasized several times that the school had been trying to do “the right thing” in building the bridge to provide access. “Yesterday our hopes collapsed and life was lost,” he said.

An assistance center for families was open at the university as authorities tried to confirm the identities of the dead.

Ten trauma patients were taken to Kendall Regional Medical Center, two of them in critical condition, hospital officials said Thursday.

Rosenberg said that at least one of those killed was a female student.

Although authorities still had not confirmed it, Orlando Duran said he believed that his daughter, Alexa Duran, was among the dead. She was driving with a friend Thursday afternoon when the bridge collapsed on top of their car, Duran said. The friend managed to escape and contacted the family, saying that the bridge had fallen onto the driver’s side of the vehicle and that Alexa Duran had been crushed inside.

“She was an angel,” Orlando Duran said by phone from London, where he was traveling for work. “She wanted to become a lawyer, and she was so beautiful.” Alexa Duran, a political-science major who would have turned 20 in May, lived at home and was close with her Ecuadorean-immigrant parents, often pressing shirts at the family’s dry cleaning business to help her mother, and accompanying her father on international business trips, according to Orlando Duran.

She had become fast friends with her sorority sisters during weekly chapter meetings, Duran said. He added that his daughter had hoped to one day work in international law.

Duran said he was frustrated that authorities had not confirmed what happened to his daughter — or even her location.

“That is the disturbing part,” he said, “We don’t know at this moment where she is.”

He said he worried that authorities had waited too long to try to pull her from the wreckage.

He was relieved, he said, that her older sister, Dina, 22, was at home with her mother on spring break from Florida State University in Tallahassee when they received the news of the bridge collapse.