Pedestrian Overpass Collapse Crushes Florida International University’s Pride

MIAMI — Florida International University, long known as a commuter school and an engine of mobility for Greater Miami’s Cuban-Americans, has in the past two decades transformed itself into one of the largest public universities in the country.

Its rapid expansion and enhanced reputation helped its selection in 2013 as an official federal research center for an engineering method called accelerated bridge construction.

On Thursday, a pedestrian bridge on campus using that very method collapsed just days after it was installed, dealing the center — and the university’s larger efforts to improve its stature — a grave blow.

“Do I worry about the image of the university? Every breathing moment,” FIU’s president, Mark B. Rosenberg, said in an interview. “But the response that we’ve gotten from around the country has been overwhelmingly positive. It’s not the time now to be worried about our image.”

Historically, many FIU students have been commuters who began their studies at Miami Dade College, then transferred, taking advantage of low tuition to get their degrees with little debt. Many of them have become pillars of Miami business and political circles.

“We are the pride and joy of the Cuban community,” said Modesto A. Maidique, a former university president.

But the student body has also diversified, and enrollment has grown to more than 50,000 from 15,000 three decades ago. Despite opposition from competing schools, the university used its tight relationships with politicians to elevate its athletic program to Division 1, add doctoral programs and open schools of architecture, law, medicine and engineering.

“We as an institution see ourselves as an anchor in the community,” Rosenberg said, with a responsibility to address major issues, including sea level rise, disparity in health outcomes, hurricanes, AIDS prevention and transportation. “We are leaning in. As an institution, we’re not in a fetal position waiting for the sky to fall.”

As the university grew, traffic on Southwest Eighth Street, along the northern edge of campus, became one of its problems. About 4,000 students lived in neighboring Sweetwater, across the busy eight-lane street. University students also work with the local elementary school in Sweetwater, which in turn sends children to the art museum on campus.

A pedestrian bridge became necessary for safety.

“This was a good project,” Rosenberg said Friday. “This was a project that spoke to our desire to build bridges. When the board hired me, I told them, ‘If you give me a pile of rocks, I’m going to build a bridge, not a wall.’ This was about neighborliness and collaboration.”

Experts in accelerated bridge construction, in which bridges are prefabricated and quickly moved into place, said it was particularly unfortunate that the collapse occurred at FIU. The university is known for its expertise in the field and has attracted top international scholars as Ph.D. students.

The Accelerated Bridge Construction University Transportation Center at FIU, a federally financed research center that received a round of $10 million in government funding in 2016, gathers, organizes and distributes information about the timesaving method. In addition to sponsoring industry conferences in Miami every two years, the center also hosts monthly online seminars that are viewed regularly by about 4,000 people, according to Michael P. Culmo, an expert in accelerated bridge construction.

“They do play a key role in the field,” said Culmo, chief technical officer for CME Associates, an engineering firm based in Mansfield, Connecticut.

The professor who leads the center, Atorod Azizinamini, a bridge engineer, has become something of an evangelist for accelerated bridge construction.

A 2016 news release from FIU said that Azizinamini, who declined to comment for this article, had presented the method to the federal Transportation Department as a way to replace deficient or obsolete bridges with minimal disruptions to traffic flow.

But FIU needed a bridge of its own.

In September 2015, Munilla Construction Management, a business led by a Cuban-American family, submitted its proposal to build the pedestrian bridge that collapsed Thursday. The project was officially known as the University City Prosperity Project.

The company’s proposal described the bridge as an innovative design that would “serve as an icon, a destination in its own right.” At the core of this proposal was accelerated bridge construction, which the company said would “showcase FIU’s prominence in the international ABC marketplace.”

The proposal emphasized the bridge’s dramatic features — a tapering pylon, glass-enclosed elevator and programmable lighting — as well as the Munilla firm’s connections. Forty percent of the firm’s team members were FIU graduates, “which enhances our passion for success,” the proposal said.

It was signed by Jorge Munilla, Munilla Construction Management’s president. “They’re significant players in the Cuban community,” said Maidique, who is also Cuban-American. Munilla’s company won the project, beating out several other firms.

On campus, where students were on spring break, the reactions of those who remained were shock, sadness and anger.

Rosenberg said the institution was planning an independent investigation of the collapse of the pedestrian bridge, which was intended to be a showcase of engineering and collaboration with the community.

“We will try to understand if there are areas where we could have done better,” he said.