Heavy snow and difficult travel expected again, heaviest snow in southern Minnesota

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 (AP)  Divers pulled a body from the Mississippi
River bridge collapse site on Sunday, and now search crews believe
they have one more person to find before being able to concentrate
solely on cleanup and rebuilding.
 


     The remains were identified as Scott Sathers, 30, of Maple
Grove, the 12th person confirmed dead. The discovery means
45-year-old Greg Jolstad of Mora is the last known person to be
missing from the Aug. 1 collapse.


      The Hennepin County Sheriff's Office said water teams recovered
human remains and a vehicle at about 8:30 a.m. on Sunday.

      Recovery crews have been using heavy equipment to pull debris
from the river and open new holes in the wreckage to allow divers
to explore areas that have previously been unreachable.

      Sathers worked in enrollment services at Capella University, a
Minneapolis-based online college, and was taking his usual route
home from work when the bridge plunged into the river.

      Capella University President Mike Offerman has described him as
"a valued friend."

      The cause of the collapse is still under investigation, but
internal documents obtained by the Star Tribune of Minneapolis and
detailed in a Sunday story shed new light on how officials came to
decide to conduct periodic inspections of the bridge rather than
repair it in the months before it crumbled.

      According to those documents, officials were ready Dec. 6 to go
ahead with a plan to install steel plates at several areas on the
bridge as a patchwork fix amid reports that it was structurally
deficient, as recommended by an outside consulting firm.

      The documents also include a memo from state bridge engineer Dan
Dorgan in response to the firm's crack study of the bridge. In it,
Dorgan told URS Inc. not to mince words when describing the
consequences if a fracture-critical beam in the superstructure
failed.

      "If the conclusion is the instability would likely lead to the
collapse of the bridge, that should be stated clearly," Dorgan
wrote.

      More than $1.5 million in funding was secured for the plating
project, but that was shelved after determining that the process
could actually weaken the bridge. Instead, officials decided in
January to go with periodic safety inspections that would look for
any cracks in the beams that would warrant emergency repair.

      Senior engineer Gary Peterson said URS assured them that any
cracks could be detected before they posed a serious safety risk.

      Those inspections of 52 steel beams began in May but were
suspended when concrete repairs began earlier this summer.

      The inspection strategy was also deemed to be more cost
effective than doing the repairs, but Peterson and Dorgan denied
that money played a role in the process.

      According to the Minnesota Department of Transportation
timeline, engineers were scheduled to meet on Aug. 20 to discuss
whether the inspections were effective or if they had to go back to
the plating idea, which turned out to be 19 days too late.

      "You can't help but ask yourself ... what should have been done
differently," Dorgan said. "As an engineer you can't be at peace
until the cause is found. And even then I have doubts that will
bring peace."

      Divers, meanwhile, are now in search of Jolstad, who is believed
to be the final victim in the collapse. Jolstad was a member of the
construction team that was doing surface repairs on the bridge when
it went down. The rest of his crew, amazingly, made it out alive,
but Jolstad's wife Lisa has feared the worst for nearly three
weeks.

      "My biggest fear is that he's going to be the last one, and
they're going to give up before they find him," Lisa Jolstad said
last week. "It's really hard when there's no news - I can't even
think about anything else."

      The metro area was pelted by steady, sometimes heavy rain and
thunder on Sunday on the trail edge of a storm system that caused
severe flooding in southeastern Minnesota, but divers and crews
kept working.

      Spokesman Randy Mitchell said operations were suspended for
about two hours late Sunday afternoon because of reports of
lightning in the area, but divers were back in the water by 6 p.m.,
searching the murky depths for Jolstad.


Gallery

Disasters

The Hennepin County medical examiner's office identified the
remains as Scott Sathers, 30, of Maple Grove.


Man's body found at site of Minnesota bridge collapse; death toll rises to 12

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