Police in Miami believe they have recovered all the bodies of those who died in a catastrophic bridge collapse on a busy highway on Thursday.

The Miami-Dade police chief, Juan Perez, told news media late on Saturday searchers had recovered all five bodies of people in vehicles that were crushed under the pedestrian bridge at Florida International University, when the structure fell on to a busy six-lane road connecting the campus to the community of Sweetwater.

Crack in Florida bridge deemed no concern just hours before collapse Read more

A sixth person died in a hospital. The search and rescue effort was continuing nonetheless, Perez said.

Three victims were found on Saturday morning in two vehicles. A third vehicle was pulled from the debris later in the day but police did not initially say whether they had found human remains inside.

As crews removed the bodies, one victim’s uncle raged against what he called the “complete incompetence” and “colossal failure” that allowed people to drive beneath the unfinished concrete span.

“Why they had to build this monstrosity in the first place to get children across the street?” said Joe Smitha, whose niece, Alexa Duran, was killed. “Then they decided to stress-test this bridge while traffic was running underneath it?”

Authorities have not released Duran’s name, but her family has said she died. The FIU freshman was studying political science.

Police confirmed the names of four victims on Saturday. Rolando Fraga Hernandez and his gold Jeep Cherokee were pulled from the wreckage. Later, the bodies of Oswald Gonzalez, 57, and Alberto Arias, 54, were found inside a white Chevy truck. Navarro Brown was pulled from the rubble on Thursday.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has confirmed that crews were applying “post-tensioning force” on the bridge before the failure. Authorities are investigating whether cracking that was reported just before the span fell contributed to the accident.

Experts were mixed on the significance of those reported cracks. Amjad Aref, a professor with the University of Buffalo’s Institute of Bridge Engineering, said that should have been “a big red flag”.

“Bridges are really very vulnerable when they are under construction, when there are just pieces,” he said. “It’s like still a flimsy structure. And when you see cracks, somebody has to raise a really big flag and say, ‘We need to do something. We need to figure out what’s happening quickly and do any mitigating actions to prevent further progression of damage and ultimately collapse,’ as we saw here.”

But Ralph Verrastro, principal of Naples-based Bridging Solutions, was not surprised to hear about cracks and said it was not necessarily a problem.

“Any bridge with concrete, that’s made of concrete, there’s always cracks,” said Verrastro, who has been an engineer for 42 years. “If they had concerns that something was going on for that main span, then they would have called the sheriff or the police and closed the road.

“I would be very surprised if it’s determined that they were taking a chance and trying to do something under traffic. It’s just, as bridge engineers, that’s just never done.”

Two days before the collapse, an engineer with the design firm left a voicemail to say some cracking had been found at one end of the span, but the voicemail was not picked up until after the collapse, Florida department of transportation (FDot) officials said on Friday.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An aerial view of the collapsed pedestrian bridge at Florida International University in Miami. Photograph: Joe Skipper/Reuters

In a transcript released on Friday night, Denney Pate of Figg Bridge Group said the cracking would need repairs but the company did not think it was a safety issue.

University officials, however, said on Saturday that FDot officials had been aware of the cracking before the collapse. They said in a statement that representatives of FIU and FDot met a Figg engineer for two hours on Thursday morning to discuss the cracking, and determined there wasn’t a safety issue. The bridge fell soon afterward.

NTSB officials have said it is too early to say whether any cracking contributed to the collapse.



In a news release late on Friday, Figg Bridge Engineers said it “continues to work diligently” to determine the cause of the collapse, and is examining the steps its team has taken. It added: “The evaluation was based on the best available information at that time and indicated that there were no safety issues.” It also asked for time to accurately determine what led to the accident.

Scheduled to open in 2019, the bridge was to provide safe passage over a canal and six lanes of traffic. The $14.2m project was supposed to take advantage of a faster, cheaper and safer method of bridge-building promoted by the university.

Smitha, Duran’s uncle, said: “This was a colossal failure of the system. This was complete incompetence from the top … I want someone to step up and say, ‘The buck stops with me.”’