Four years after fatal collapse, Florida unveils design for a new FIU pedestrian bridge

Four years after the Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapsed during construction, the state is unveiling designs for a new bridge that would be made of different material.

Florida’s Department of Transportation held its first public meeting on the proposal Thursday night. Engineers called the plan a standard steel structure without the novel design of the first bridge, which fell on March 15, 2018. The midday collapse that crushed cars on the roadways below and killed six people.

The first question at Thursday’s hearing at the Ronselli Park community center came from Sweetwater Commissioner Marcos Villanueva, who asked if traffic would be stopped when inspectors perform structural tests of the bridge — work that preceded the 2018 collapse.

“Yes,” said Daniel Raymat, an engineer with the firm designing the new bridge on a state contract, BCC Engineering. “There’s not going to be any overhead work when there is traffic.”

Villanueva responded: “Thank you. I wish we had done that the first time.”

Florida announced the replacement bridge project in 2020, pledging a safer approach to constructing a structure over one of the busiest streets in Miami-Dade County.

Instead of the concrete structure that was considered cutting edge before its failure, the new bridge will be made of traditional steel girders, said Daniel Iglesias, an engineer overseeing state transportation projects in the Miami area.

The first bridge was pre-built on a staging area nearby and put into place days before the collapse. Contractors used an “accelerated” construction method as a way to shorten building times and minimize traffic disruption.

The new bridge connecting the campus with Sweetwater over Southwest Eighth Street would be built at the site, and their plan will take into account Eighth Street traffic disruptions.

“We’re not contemplating accelerated construction. It will be conventional construction done in phases,” Iglesias said. “Road closures and detours will be needed.”

The Department of Transportation had FIU manage the first bridge project, awarding design and construction to contractor MCM and the Figg engineering firm after the two companies won a bidding contest for the $13 million project.

Federal transportation investigators cited design flaws in explaining the collapse, and blamed the contractors, FIU and Florida’s Transportation Department for leaving Eighth Street open while construction crews performed emergency repairs on the bridge just before the catastrophe.

The National Transportation Safety Board criticized Florida’s Transportation Department for outsourcing the project to FIU, noting the school didn’t have the engineering staff to provide adequate oversight of contractors.

This time, Florida’s Department of Transportation said it is directly managing the new project. Sweetwater and FIU are listed as local partners.

Designs are more than halfway done for the new bridge, with plans to invite bids for the construction contract in early 2024, Iglesias said. The budget for the new pedestrian bridge is about $15 million.

Dave Beck, a retired structural engineer in Bennington, N.H., who has studied the FIU bridge collapse, said Florida’s new plans for a bridge sound far more generic and traditional than the first one.

“Making a pedestrian bridge doesn’t have to be that complicated,” he said. “Using steel instead of concrete, that’s the way to go.”

This story was originally published May 4, 2022 at 7:18 PM.