Despite Pledge, Sabo Bridge Report Not Released Thursday

Despite the full report into the failure of the Sabo pedestrian bridge being delivered by its consultants on Thursday, the city of Minneapolis will not immediately release it to the public as it initially promised.

A spokesman for Wise, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc, the Chicago-based consulting firm hired by the city, confirmed to 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that it will forward its report to city officials by the end of the day Thursday.

However, a city spokesman said the report would not be released to the public until Friday, in part due to the late hour of the report's delivery.

When reached Thursday afternoon, Steve Kotke, the city's director of public works, said he had not yet seen the full report but did not expect it to differ significantly from the consultant's summary report issued June 8.

That report found that four of the Sabo pedestrian bridge's 18 stay cables had some sort of defect or fracture and one had "extensive fatigue cracking" before it fractured, causing the bridge to be temporarily closed in February.

In addition, the document noted that winds as light as five to 10 miles per hour were enough to cause cable vibrations that induced damaging stress on the bridge's cables. URS, the firm that designed the bridge, did not include wind calculations in the original design calculations package, the summary said.

That does not mean such calculations were not made, Kotke cautioned at the time.

On Thursday, Kotke said URS had since provided the consultants with more information about whether URS took wind into account in the bridge design.

Kotke said he felt a sense of urgency to reach his "primary goal" of completing repairs to the bridge by winter. At the same time, he said the city will decide on "issues of responsibility," and whether URS or someone else should foot the repair bill.

So far, the costs of shoring up the bridge, detouring traffic for several weeks, and determining the cause of the cable failures has reached approximately $1 million.

Staff at the Met Council, which put on hold a decision about whether to hire URS for a $94 million contract to engineer the new Southwest Light Rail line, has now met with representatives from URS about the problems with the Sabo bridge, a spokesperson confirmed.

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