Jeremy Hernandez

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Trapped in a tipping school bus with 50 children, he kicked open the back door and began helping them one by one to safety.

Within a day, news outlets across the country were repeating the story of the school bus, along with a sad footnote — that Mr. Hernandez had recently been forced to drop out of an automotive repair program because he could not afford the $15,000 tuition.

[...]

He spent the weekend fishing. When President Bush’s staff contacted him to request a photo opportunity, “He was just, like, ‘Nope,’ ” she said.

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Bush Blames Democrats for Bridge Collapse.

Chimp Speaks. Toads and Lizards pour out of his thin, cruel lips.

Investigators in bridge collapse focus on chilling video

Early signs of problems emerged in 1990, officials at the Minnesota Department of Transportation reported Thursday. Annual inspections found the bridge to be "structurally deficient," but safe for the time being.

About 73,000 bridges in the U.S. are rated structurally deficient, according to the Federal Highway Administration. It means the bridges will need to be replaced eventually, but they currently are still considered safe.

An estimated 141,000 vehicles made the trip on the I-35W bridge each day in the Twin Cities. It was the most-traveled bridge in Minnesota and one of the busiest arteries in the Midwest. By comparison, Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway handles about 180,000 vehicles each weekday.

At the time of the accident, an I-35W bridge inspection that was set for completion in September was to determine whether to overhaul the entire bridge, or tear it down, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said.

The surfacing of the video, which was provided to the Minneapolis Police Department, "is the equivalent of recovering the cockpit flight recorder" from a downed plane, said Mark Rosenker, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation.

Authorities were also buoyed by the news that a Federal Highway Administration employee had produced an exact computer software model of the Interstate 35W bridge when he was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota. The model will be used in a failure-analysis study to map out every edge and surface of the 1,900-foot-long bridge structure, with the goal of pinpointing what went wrong, officials said.

Decaying Bridges Span Nation

A Federal Highway Administration inventory of bridges estimates that about 73,000 bridges are structurally deficient and an additional 80,000 are "functionally obsolete," meaning they are carrying more traffic than they are designed for. According to FHA, there are 756 steel deck truss bridges similar to the one in Minneapolis. On Aug. 2, the U.S. Department of Transportation ordered that states inspect them all.

"What happened in Minnesota is simply unacceptable," said Transportation Secretary Mary Peters. "We must have a top-to-bottom review of the bridge inspection program to make sure that everything is being done to keep this kind of tragedy from occurring again." Peters pledged an immediate $5 million "to help restore the traffic flow, to clear the debris, to set up detours and to begin the repair work." She also asked the DOT inspector general to examine the highway administration's national bridge inspection program for any lapses.

In a previous audit, the inspector general's office found that more than 6,300 of the 114,000 national highway system bridges are "structurally deficient," defining "deficient" as "major deterioration, cracks or other deficiencies in their decks, structure or foundations." But the same report found that while bridge inspections in three states that it analyzed--Massachusetts, Texas and New York--proved adequate, inspectors made mistakes in calculating the load that 12 of the 33 bridges examined could bear. As structural problems develop, the report said, transportation officials need to do a better job of limiting the weight of vehicles using decaying bridges.