Part of a four-lane freeway bridge over a river in rural
Washington state collapsed on Thursday, sending vehicles and drivers
tumbling into the frigid water, authorities said.
Two of
the three people rescued from the river were hospitalized with
hypothermia, said Given Kutz, a spokesman for Skagit County in the
northern part of the state.
There were apparently no fatalities. “They (rescuers) don’t expect anyone else (remains) in the water,” he said.
Authorities
were awaiting confirmation on the cause of the collapse, said a second
Skagit County spokesman, Jim Martin. Local media reported it might have
been caused by a truck striking the structure.
It was not raining at the time, Washington State Patrol spokesman Trooper Mark Francis said.
The
bridge is on the Interstate 5 freeway where it crosses the Skagit River
between the towns of Mount Vernon and Burlington, 55 miles north of
Seattle.
The freeway is the main corridor for car traffic between Seattle and Vancouver, Canada.
The bridge was built in 1955, according to the website for the National Bridge Inventory Database.
Local
television images showed onlookers gathered at the bank of the Skagit
River, calmly watching the rescue attempts under the fallen bridge
section.
“The currents of the river are really rough. It’s cold,” Barbara Williams, who lives nearby, told Seattle station KOMO-TV.
The
bridge collapse comes at a time when state lawmakers are debating a
proposed $8.4 billion transportation funding package that Washington
state Governor Jay Inslee has championed, along with fellow Democrats in
the legislature.
In August 2007, a bridge fell in Minnesota
resulting in the deaths of 13 people, which raised concerns about faulty
infrastructure in the United States.
That incident saw about
1,000 feet of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapse into the
Mississippi River during evening rush hour.
The U.S. National
Transportation Safety Board subsequently found more than a dozen steel
support plates suspected of causing the disaster were deficient in size,
and a routine inspection would not have uncovered the problem.
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