MIAMI _ On the morning before the pedestrian bridge at Florida International University collapsed over a busy Miami street in March 2018, killing six people and injuring eight others, the firm that designed the span assured a meeting of state highway officials, university administrators, contractors and others that the span was safe.
That assurance is reflected in records released Monday by the Florida Department of Transportation.
Until now, the National Transportation Safety Board had ordered that the records be withheld as an investigation unfolded.
The 950-ton bridge was developing severe cracks in the days before it collapsed, witnesses and workers have reported.
But no one ordered that the underlying road be closed. The morning of the collapse, officials from Tallahassee-based FIGG Bridge Group, which designed the bridge, FIU and FDOT, as well as Munilla Construction Management, the private contractors building the bridge, met to discuss the cracks.
"FIGG assured that there was no concern with safety of the span suspended over the road," according to minutes of the meeting that began at 9 a.m. on March 15, 208.
At the meeting, MCM, a politically connected firm that formed a joint venture to design the bridge, asked whether cracks appeared to be getting wider or longer.
"CEI (construction, engineering and inspection team) confirmed cracks have increased in length daily," the minutes said. "FUI commented to FIGG that nothing predicted this cracking," the minutes added.
Meeting participants discussed whether any short-term repairs were necessary to bolster the bridge before a more permanent solution could be found. FIGG apparently nixed the idea.
"FIGG mentioned that no repairs should be done now," the minutes said. Meeting participants seemed perplexed as to why the bridge, which had not even opened for traffic yet, already was cracking. Engineers with the Florida Department of Transportation asked FIGG: "Are you going to continue to figure out why it happened?," the minutes say. "FIGG responded that all we 'know is that it just happened'."
A spokesperson for FIGG did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Representatives for Bolton Perez and Associates of Miami, the group conducting the primary inspection of the bridge, said at the time the cracks have "increased in length daily."
FIGG and the contractor that built it had no response when asked whether there would be a crack monitoring plan.
The $14.3 million bridge had been built on the side of Southwest Eighth Street, also known as Tamiami Trail, then hoisted into place, in a process known as accelerated bridge construction that made prolonged street closures unnecessary.
A bridge worker had noticed cracks in the bridge on March 10 _ the day the prefabricated bridge had been raised over a busy commuter road _ and passed photos of the cracks up the chain of command, according to his attorneys.
Three days later, the project's chief engineer reported the cracks to the state's transportation department, although the engineer said he and his team were "not concerned about it."
In the end, no one gave the order to shut down Southwest Eighth Street. So when the bridge came crashing down, five people waiting in idling cars beneath the 174-foot concrete span were crushed to death. A bridge worker who had been standing on the bridge died, too. Workers had been tightening internal steel rods running through the damaged section of the bridge.
Federal regulators previously suggested that design flaws in the bridge led to cracking in a critical portion that collapsed during construction.
A two-page report by the National Transportation Safety Board published in November stopped short of explicitly blaming the design errors for the bridge's collapse. The board's findings on the cause of the bridge's catastrophic failure are expected to come in a full report later this year.
The NTSB investigative update bolstered conclusions reached by independent bridge engineering experts consulted by the Miami Herald and others posting in online professional forums.
The NTSB brief echoed what the experts told the Herald after examining publicly available engineering calculations and plans for the bridge: Design errors meant that a key structural connection in the span, a point at which a diagonal strut identified as Number 11 met the deck of the bridge span and a vertical column, was too weak to support the large forces it was supposed to withstand.
Experts from the Federal Highway Administration who examined the plans and calculations for the NTSB concluded that the engineers on the project team, who worked for FIGG, underestimated the structural load on that section while overestimating the strength of the connection.
The report does not name FIGG, which formed a joint venture with MCM to design and build the pedestrian bridge for FIU. MCM said it filed for bankruptcy on March 1 _ a steep reversal in fortunes for a company that had been a top builder of local government projects. The company has reached a deal with its insurers to pay up to $42 million to victims and their families.
