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MINNEAPOLIS, Aug. 8 — Investigators have found what may be a design flaw in the bridge that collapsed here a week ago, in the steel parts that connect girders, raising safety concerns for other bridges around the country, federal officials said on Wednesday. The Federal Highway Administration swiftly responded by urging all states to take extra care with how much weight they place on bridges of any design when sending construction crews to work on them. Crews were doing work on the deck of the Interstate 35W bridge here when it gave way, hurling rush-hour traffic into the Mississippi River...

MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) - A week after a deadly bridge collapse, U.S. Navy divers cut through tangled debris with underwater torches and saws on Wednesday in the search for victims while investigators identified a possible flaw in the 40-year-old span's design. The August 1 rush-hour collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge hurled vehicles into the Mississippi River 65 feet (20 meters) below, with many tumbling onto the bridge's crumpled concrete deck. Reacting to the disaster, officials demanded inspections of potentially suspect bridges across the United States amid renewed calls to shore up the country's aging infrastructure. Five people were killed in...

MINNEAPOLIS — Authorities investigating the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge are looking for a person who was in a kayak below or near the bridge when it tumbled into the Mississippi River last week, Minneapolis Police Capt. Mike Martin said Wednesday. "We need to talk to that person," Martin said.

A week after a deadly bridge collapse, U.S. Navy divers cut through tangled debris with underwater torches and saws on Wednesday in the search for victims while investigators identified a possible flaw in the 40-year-old span's design.

A Quarter-Billion Dollars Goes to Repair a 1/3-Mile, 64-Foot-High Bridge Before adjourning for its August recess early Sunday, Congress quickly passed a bill spending $250 million to repair the 1,907-foot I-35 bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, an expenditure of about $130,000 per foot. This is more than three times the cost-per-foot of Alaska's infamous "Bridge to Nowhere." Under the bill, the federal government will bear the full cost of I-35 repairs. The quarter-billion-dollar spending measure raced through Congress in about two days. According to the Department of Transportation, the collapsed I-35 bridge was 1,907 feet long (just over one-third of a...

By now it's been so widely adopted by the media that it's easy to be numb to it, but Chicago Tribune's E.A. Torriero breathed new life into the Bush-caused-it meme in the I-35W bridge collapse story by adding a new twist. The bridge collapse, suggested Torriero, is insult added to injury for mostly Muslim Somali immigrants already angered by American foreign policy. In a story filed the evening of August 7, Torriero portrayed the collapse as insult added to injury for Somali immigrants, weaving in suggestions that America under President Bush is becoming akin to a third world country, unable...

Excerpt - 360 degree aerial panorama over the collapsed I-35W bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, MN. This was shot the morning after the collapse when there was a TFR (temporary flight restriction) over the bridge, and I had to fly significantly higher than I normally shoot, so you won't be able to see much detail in the bridge. I may be able to do more at a decent altitude when the TFR is lifted. Click and drag to move around, up, or down. SHIFT zooms in, CTRL zooms out. (QuickTime or Java required)

An elite team of Navy divers joined the search for victims of the interstate bridge collapse Tuesday, bringing to the job lessons learned from such disasters as TWA Flight 800 and the loss of the space shuttle Columbia. The team of 16 divers and a five-member command crew arrived a day earlier. Once their gear arrived before dawn Tuesday, several divers immediately entered the Mississippi River even though local officials encouraged them to wait until daybreak. "Two in the morning, they dove into the water," Minneapolis Police Capt. Mike Martin said, calling them "the best divers in the world." "These...

Presidential advisors Karl Rove and Josh Bolton confer as President George W. Bush visits the damage of the collapsed I-35W bridge in Minneapolis in a photo published Monday, Aug. 06, 2007 on TIME Magazine's online "White House Photo Blog." Rove is clearly using an Apple iPhone:

Ex-Clinton Official Ties Minneapolis Bridge Collapse To Global Warming By Noel Sheppard | August 7, 2007 - 00:12 ET A former member of the Clinton administration, and current Senior Fellow at the virtual Clinton think tank the Center for American Progress, claimed Monday that global warming might have played a factor in the collapse of the I35 bridge in Minneapolis last week. I kid you not. Writing at Climate Progress, the global warming blog of CAP, Joseph Romm - who served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1997 and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary from...

Public officials in Minnesota had been warned that increasing truck traffic from international trade was placing an undue stress on the state's transportation infrastructure, including specific warnings concerning the now-collapsed bridge over the Mississippi on Interstate 35W in Minneapolis. As WND reported, a Federal Highway Administration study begun in 1998 warned increased NAFTA truck traffic would endanger Minnesota bridges along I-35.

The Westboro Baptist Church has announced that they will be protesting the funerals of two victims of the 35W Bridge Collapse. They will be protesting the funeral of Paul Eickstadt at 10:45 AM on Tuesday, August 7th at Grace Evangelical Free Church at 755 73rd Ave. in Minneapolis. They will also be protesting the funeral of Sherry Lou Engebretsen at 10:45 AM on Wednesday, August 8th at Incarnation Lutheran Church at 4880 North Hodgson Rd. in Shoreview, MN. Links to copy and paste to your URL.... These two are just opinions on why the bridge collapsed. 1. http://www.godhatesfags.com/writings/20070804_americas-highways-lay-waste.pdf 2. http://www.godhatesfags.com/fliers/aug2007/20070802_minneapolis-bridge-collapse.pdf...

ST. PAUL -- Governor Pawlenty says he had been reconsidering his opposition to a gas tax increase even before last week's Minneapolis bridge collapse. Last Friday Pawlenty said he'd agree to raise the state's 20 cents-per-gallon gas tax as part of a comprehensive transportation package. That's after he had vetoed gas tax increases in 2005 and again in 2007. Pawlenty now says that the Interstate 35W bridge collapse has made him willing to do, quote, "everything and anything necessary" to raise more money for bridges and roads. But, both Pawlenty and the leading Democratic lawmaker on transportation said today that...

Tuesday, August 7, 2007 It took a collapsing bridge in Minnesota to alert people across the country to the fact that many other bridges in many other places have been allowed to deteriorate without adequate maintenance. If this were just a matter of poor political leadership at various levels of government, we could at least hope for better leaders in the future. But the problem goes deeper than that. It is not just the people but the incentives that are responsible for the neglect of infrastructure, while tax money is lavished on all sorts of less urgent projects. In other...

Bridge collapse inspires threats against MnDOT employees, senator says MnDOT employees are facing threats in the wake of the I35W bridge collapse, says the chair of the Senate Transportation Committtee. Some Minnesota Department of Transportation employees have found themselves the target of "very serious threats" in the wake of the 35W bridge collapse, Sen. Steve Murphy said in a Monday news conference. As a result, he said, MnDOT is considering taking bridge inspection reports off its website until the names and contact phone numbers for individual bridge inspectors and other officials can be removed.

New Orleans (AP) -- For New Orleans residents, the scene was all too familiar: President Bush, touring the site of the collapsed I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, promising to cut red tape and rebuild as quickly as possible. Nearly two years ago, with parts of New Orleans still under water after Hurricane Katrina, Bush made similar declarations in the French Quarter. The president's promise was all Melanie Thompson needed to hear to bring back her family of five and begin work on their flooded home. But today Thompson's family is still living in a cramped trailer and awaiting aid to rebuild....

Dunwoody College is offering to help pay tuition for Jeremy Hernandez, the Interstate 35W bridge's school bus rescue hero. Jeremy told reporters at a news conference that his financial difficulties forced him to drop out of Dunwoody. He aspired to be an automotive mechanic. Dunwoody received many phone calls and e-mails after the news conference from alumni and staff encouraging the college to help Jeremy with school. In response, the College responded with an e-mail to alumni and faculty that stated its intention to help Jeremy re-enroll at Dunwoody An e-mail issued by the Dunwoody administration to staff and alumni...

Families are still huddled near the bridge but already Congressional Democrats are blasting the Bush Administration for failing to spend enough money on infrastructure. This is as indecent as it is stupid. One briefing today declared there are 77,000 bridges in the same classification as the 35W. The problem is obviously the inspection process, not the expenditure --an inability to focus on and find those structures close to catastrophic collapse. The bridge was in fact undergoing a $9 million maintenance program, with many workers on the span when disaster struck. Would $9 million have been enough to repair whatever flaw...

I am writing about an issue that concerns me greatly. I reside in Southern MN and, like everyone in this area, was shocked and saddened by the recent tragedy that has occurred in Minneapolis. The Phelps Family of the Westboro Baptist Church (or "WBC") in Topeka, KS, the same who picketed funerals of fallen soldiers back from Iraq, plans to picket the funerals of the victims of the bridge collapse. I am severely outraged at this disrespectful display of hate, and I am certain that others would feel the same way were they to know of these plans. I am...

Though inspections rate more than 70,000 bridges nationwide structurally deficient, a top transportation official Friday called the deadly failure of a Mississippi River bridge an "anomaly" and said motorists shouldn't fear for their safety. "I don't believe that they should be worried at all," National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Mark Rosenker said while visiting the bridge wreckage in Minneapolis. Rules in place for 30 years "have improved the conditions and the standards that in fact these things are being inspected on," he said. "But with that said, as a result of this catastrophic disaster, we're going to be looking at...