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Photo and text by John A. Weeks III, Copyright © 2007, all rights reserved.
For further information, contact: john@johnweeks.com
Not true. The bridge was fully inside of Minneapolis. It is 2 miles from any part of Saint Paul, and the bridge runs north and south, whereas St. Paul is east of the bridge. There are Mississippi River bridges that cross between Minneapolis and St. Paul, such as the Lake Street Bridge and the Intercity Bridge (on Ford Parkway), but the I-35W Bridge did not.
Not even close. The Bong Bridge between Duluth and Superior is 11,800 feet, 5 times a long.
How about longest bridge fully inside of Minnesota? No, the Lafayette Bridge is 3,369 feet, nearly twice as long as the 1,907 foot long I-35W bridge. There are 7 bridges in the metro area across the Minnesota River that are even longer. This includes the two spans of the Bloomington Ferry Bridge (5,856 feet SB, 5,824 feet NB), Cedar Avenue Bridge spans (5,185 feet SB, 5,164 feet NB), I-494 Bridge spans (4,509 feet WB, 4,393 feet EB), and the Mendota Bridge (4,118 feet, which is 4/5 of a mile long).
How about the longest clear span? Again, no, the Hennepin Ave Bridge has a 625 foot clear span, while the I-35W bridge had a clear span of 458 feet. That does not, however, diminish the importance of this river crossing.
No, it was the 3rd busiest bridge in the metro area, and the state. The I-94 Dartmouth carries 157,000 cars per day, and the I-694 bridge carries 150,000 cars per day, while the I-35W was measured at 140,000 cars per day. That is a lot of traffic, but not the most. Note that these are 2006 traffic volumes.
Not true. The Washington Avenue Bridge is downriver 6/10s of a mile. That is the famous bridge with the roof top walkway painted in the maroon and gold U of M colors.
The I-35W bridge was once proposed to be called the St. Anthony Bridge, but that name was never officially adopted. As a result, the bridge had no official name. The area on the north side of the bridge was once the City of St. Anthony. The City of St. Anthony merged with the City of Minneapolis in 1872. This is not the current City of St. Anthony. The current City of St. Anthony is the former Village of St. Anthony, which incorporated to be a city in 1945.
Not exactly. There are university buildings on the south side of the I-35W crossing, and a student housing area on the north side, but the I-35W bridge was on the far west fringe of the U of M campus. The Washington Ave bridge would be the bridge that ties the two campuses together.
Not true. The bridge was inspected every year since 1993, and every other year before that. This was not known as a problem bridge or a bridge in trouble. It did have some maintenance items over the years. A key factor with this bridge is that it was an older non-redundant design, which the engineers call "fracture critical". The term "structurally deficient" is an engineering term that can be applied for a variety of reasons. A number of inspections found the bridge to be serviceable, and projected several decades of future service, though none of them would build a bridge like that today knowing what we know since 1967.
A bridge is rated on a scale of 0 to 100. The I-35W bridge was rated at 50. A rating of 50 or below is eligible for federal funds for replacement. There are many other such bridges in the state. At a rating of 50, the I-35W bridge was actually rated the highest in that category. In fact, there is another heavily used metro area Mississippi River crossing that scored worse than the I-35W bridge, and that is the Lafayette Bridge in St. Paul. In 1999, an inspection of the Rock Island Toll Bridge over the Mississippi River in Newport found the structure to be in such bad condition that it was closed on the spot, and it has not been reopened since that time.
The US Army Corps of Engineers states that the bridge is 64 feet from the level pool height (normal water level) to the low steel on the bridge. Since the bridge had this huge truss under it, there is quite a distance from low steel to the deck. While I have not determined the actual deck height, various estimates put it anywhere from 98 feet to 118 feet above the normal water level. As a result, people on the center of the channel span fell 100 feet before they hit the water. It is a miracle that any of those people survived.
Update—the editor of the Wikipedia page on the I-35W bridge has turned up some definitive information. The low steel to river bottom is 78 feet. High steel to river bottom is 132 feet. The river is 15 feet deep at normal pool depth. That means that low steel is 78 - 15, or 63 feet above normal water level. The high steel (bottom of the deck) is 132 - 15, which is 117 feet. Add in a foot or so for the deck, and we have 118 feet from the deck to the water.
Update—Road Scholar Adam Froehlig located an old bridge plan in the archives at MN-DOT that included elevation measurements. The plan lists the middle point of the main span at 841.1 feet. Given that the flat pool elevation of the water is 724.64 feet, that results in a deck height of 116.46 feet. I consider that to be the final answer.
Not true. The construction project was to fix the curbs, update the lighting, and fix some potholes in the deck. Yes, they were using jackhammers and pouring concrete. Two lanes were closed in each direction. But the deck itself was not being replaced, and was not estimated to need replacement for at least a decade.
The main span between the support piers on each side of the river was 458 feet. The US Army Corps of Engineers states that the navigation channel is 390 feet wide. This means that the river is 458 feet wide (since the piers are right at the river edge), but river boats can only use 390 feet of that 458 foot wide passage. The reason is that the US Army Corps of Engineers has to dredge the river to make it deep enough for boats, and it doesn't dredge the full width of the river. This is typical of the upper section of the Mississippi River. It can be a mile or more wide in places, but the navigation channel is normally a well defined relatively narrow path down the river.
There does happen to be a building just south of the former bridge that was once a Rand Corporation lab for doing classified DOD work. That building is now owned by the University of Minnesota, where they continue to do classified work. However, if this was a weapon, wouldn't there be other buildings and parking ramps be damaged, not to mention the bridge that stood right next to the I-35W bridge? And if the Russians had this information, how is it that the conspiracy people got it but the reputable newspapers did not?
Update—website www.spoof.com has admitted that they made up this story and planted it on various blog sites across the Internet. It is not true.
The University does have several underground facilities, and there is a nuclear research lab located within feet of the north end of the bridge. That is the Tandem Accelerator Lab. To the best of my understanding, the accelerator has been retired and removed, and the building is being cleaned up to be used for other purposes. One would think that if this facility caused damage to the bridge, it would have shown up while the accelerator was still running, and not many years after it was shut down. You might also expect other buildings to have been damaged. In fact, a power plant across the street from the Tandem Lab unexpectedly collapsed into the river about a decade ago. Bottom line is that any radiation that could damage a bridge should have caused far more damage to the people in the lab, and history has not shown that to be true.
If you count the I as a 1, then 1 + 3 + 5 = 9. The date was August 1, and August is the 8th month, so again, 8 + 1 = 9. 2007 means 2 + 0 + 0 + 7 = 9. Since 9's are coming up all over, this bridge was doomed. The numerologists go on and on finding 9's everywhere they look. The only problem is that just adding digits to find 9 or any other number is contrived. It has no real world physical meaning. If this theory was sound, then why didn't the I-35W bridge over the Minnesota River also fall down the same day? Why didn't they predict the disaster in advance?
Eye witnesses reported hearing a series of sounds that went, "bang, bang, bang, bang, bang", then the bridge rose up slightly, then it fell in from the south end to the north end. It was just like when they show controlled demolitions on TV. As it turns out, this observation is probably very accurate, but the conclusion is wrong. When a beam or brace in tension (being pulled from both ends) breaks, it does sound like a gun shot. Once a beam breaks, the bridge does not fall that instant. The bridge has mass, and it takes time to accelerate and gain speed. It may also take more than one beam to break before the bridge is doomed to falling down. So, it is not unreasonable for the bridge to have had several beams break before the bridge started to fall down. And when the beams broke, the tension could have been released as an slight upward movement. Everything that these witnesses report is consistent with a structural failure.
The huge restricted area extends upwards of mile from the site, which is not a very democratic way to run a nation. We should be allowed to observe our government in action. The Sheriff counters that this is an active crime scene that needs to be secured. If that was true, then what crime was committed? The best answer that I have heard so far is that they want to preserve the dignity of the site because there are still deceased victims in the water.
It is only natural for government agencies to want to cover their butts. But MN-DOT data is public, and they have to release it. So far, they have. The data shows that they had no reason to believe that this was a structure that was in trouble.
The so-called NAFTA highway, which would run from Mexico to Canada, is I-69. In reality, there is very little north of Minneapolis, especially north of Duluth. There is no market for large amounts of goods brought up on trucks. I-69 would feed such a market towards Toronto. Even I-29 would feed a relatively large market starting with Winnipeg and going west. Finally, there are truck bypasses around both sides of the Twin Cities, so the I-35W bridge is not critical for the movement of goods on a national scale.
Astrologers claim that the planets were lined up the same way as they were in December of 1967 when the Silver Bridge fell. The same planetary forces that brought down the Silver Bridge also caused the accident on the I-35W Mississippi River crossing. First, the planets were not in the same positions. The Silver Bridge accident was 40 years ago, and some planets have orbits that are longer than 40 years. The moon, which has the biggest pull on the planet Earth, was in a different location. Some astrologers say it was caused by the planet Mercury. As it turns out, the pull that Mercury has on Earth is minute, whereas the Sun, which is about as far away, has a huge pull on our planet. Planets simply cannot put enough force on anything to affect it here on Earth.
The media did become concerned that the numbers were changing, so the government officials stopped quoting numbers. Names of 8 missing have since been released. Members of the Somoli community were on TV saying that they had a long list of missing people, but that they would not release the names out of respect for the dead. This is one of those issues where you will never be able to prove or disprove what happened, but keeping it quiet would require preventing a large number of people from talking. Finally, one needs to ask how anyone would benefit from hiding the deaths of a group of minority people. Even if insurance money was an issue, relatives can wait the required seven years and file for a death certificate and collect the insurance. This theory just doesn't make sense.
The I-35W bridge collapse is one of the few bridge collapses in the US over the past 50 years that has not had an obvious cause. For example, if a ship hits a bridge, and the bridge comes down, that is pretty easy to figure out. One other such collapse was the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River on December 15, 1967. That bridge was full of rush hour traffic and Christmas shoppers. There were 46 fatalities when it collapsed into the icy Ohio River.
What is odd about the Silver Bridge is that many locals reported seeing a human-sized creature that looked a lot like an insect in the area around the bridge in the weeks before it collapsed. They called this creature Mothman. Even more strange is that the police and fire departments were bombarded with thousands of phone calls, most of which were unintelligible, leading up to the crash. About the only words that could be made out were "Ohio River disaster".
Mothman disappeared after the bridge collapse. Many locals blamed the accident on this creature. In reality, the bridge fell due to a single piece of hardware called an eye-bar that had a manufacturing defect in an area that could not be inspected. That part was non-redundant. That is, when it failed, a similar twin eye-bar could not hold the weight of that side of the bridge. The 2nd eye-bar failed, putting the full load of the bridge on the eye-bars on the other side of the bridge. They soon failed, and the structure collapsed into the river.
The I-35W bridge is similar to the Silver Bridge in that it was a non-redundant design. It had components that, when they fail, the entire bridge would collapse. Was there any Mothman sightings? So far, no one has come forward or called the Art Bell show, so I think it is safe to rule out Mothman.
Update—BBC1 planned to show the movie "The Mothman Prophecies" on Friday, August 10, but has now replaced that movie with another movie due to concern that it might "cause distress" in light of recent news events.
Update—it didn't take long. A caller to the Art Bell show (or rather, Coast To Coast AM now that Art Bell is again retired) on August 10, 2007, told host George Noory that she had seen Mothman near Stewartville, Minnesota, on June 27th. That was over a month before the bridge collapse.
There is an Internet story floating around that parts of the security video captured by the US Army Corps of Engineers are missing. When the video was first aired on CNN, it had timestamps in the corner of the image. At one point, the time skips from 18:01:45 to 18:01:48, skipping 3 seconds, which is an eternity during an event like this. Note that the timestamp clock was off by a few minutes. On later versions of the video, the timestamps were covered up.
It is worth mentioning that this video is not a video. Rather, it is a sequence of still photos taken from a security camera that have been joined together into a movie-like sequence. Some sources say that it is one image per second, other say it was 4 images per second. At any rate, systems that capture images in this manner are prone to missing images every so often.
At this point, it seems that the missing time is real. The question remains if this was intentional, or if that is all the data that was available. In either case, the missing frames should have been replaced with blank frames to keep the sequence of events in the video in proper time order.
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Photo and text by John A. Weeks III, Copyright © 2007, all rights reserved.
For further information, contact:
john@johnweeks.com