Man's body found at site of Minnesota bridge collapse; death toll rises to 12
(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.
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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."
They're not giving up yet.
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.
