Collapsed Bridge in Minnesota - Essay Example

Emergency Management: Collapsed Bridge in Minnesota Introduction Emergency Management has become one of the important aspects for any country's prosperity. The role of emergency management is vital as it takes care of preventing attacks on homeland and recovering from a disaster. The need for an organization that has the capability to manage this has become essential after the world has seen incidents like 9th and 11th September 2001 attacks on the WTC (World Trade Center) and the Pentagon. These attacks have created havoc in the society and their effects are felt till date. As a response to these incidents, the United States federal government has taken the initiative and established a US department of homeland security (@dhs.gov, 2007). This department was started with an aim of protecting homeland and it includes many organizations under itself making it to be the fifth largest government organization of United States. Emergency management is a continuous process involving a set of four phases namely mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery (@dhs.gov, 2007). Mitigation, a long term process, is the phase that continuously monitors the homeland thereby avoiding and reducing risk. Preparedness signifies regarding the plan of action that ought to be implemented at the time of disasters. Important among these are communication plans, maintenance of emergency services and building emergency shelters etc. This also includes anticipating disaster or post disaster activities. The response phase provides immediate response to a disaster. This phase mainly involves the services of fire fighting team, police and ambulance etc. Recovery focuses on the recoil activities or better said working for bringing back the affected area to its original state. The 'I-35W Bridge' tragedy The department of homeland security in US had many criticisms regarding the inclusion and exclusion of certain departments and also the budget being misused and likes. These were serious challenges for the DHS as it was unable to live to the expectations at a particular instant and was constantly tested in the areas of working with synchronization and coordination. The plan of action was also named to be weak by critics and media. In spite of all the above mentioned issues the DHS still sets high standards and has tremendous support from the higher officials in the government. This essay would critically examine the behavior of DHS in response to the Inter State-35W (I-35W Bridge) Mississippi river bridge collapse. The 'I-35W Bridge' located in Minneapolis was a one hundred fifteen feet (115 feet) high, One thousand nine hundred and seven feet long (1907 feet) giant whose construction started in 1964 and was open in November 1967 (@live.asce.org, 2007). This steel truss arch bridge was Minnesota's fifth busiest bridge according to the recent stats, carrying around One hundred forty thousand vehicles per day. The world has seen yet another disaster on the first of August 2007 during the rush hours of Minnesota. This bridge collapsed into the river submerging many vehicles, taking away the innocent lives of thirteen people and causing injuries to hundreds. (@johnweeks.com, 2007) Emergency management team's action The analysis here begins with taking a few factors into consideration and later examining few issues that would have made the Emergency management even better. The DHS claims, and it should, that their plan of action after this accident in order to control the situation was among one of their success stories. This is true to a great extent. Let us consider their plan of action. Assuming that the efficiency of emergency management after the occurrence of a disaster is measured in terms of the response time, that is, time taken to reach the affected spot and carry out the rescue efforts, the team has to be crowned for having the preparedness to reach the affected spot within six minutes (@dhs.gov, 2007). The support of the civilians cannot be neglected though. The emergency management team responded quickly and they were at the spot within six minutes. This accident was tricky, in the sense that there were few people who were struck in the vehicles and few others who were badly injured. The decision made then at that time was to firstly rescue people who were struck in vehicles. As the accident took place in the evening time, the rescue efforts lasted throughout night with the emergency management team along with the help of civilians. At the outbreak of the incident, few vehicles caught fire and the fire fighter squad was successful in rescuing them too. It is important here to understand that it was not such an easy situation to handle. This could have gone either ways. To maintain the coordination among different organizations in the emergency management team and to work effectively, driving them in the right direction is a real hard task and the Emergency management team on that day had full points in this regard. After the task for the day was done, there was a revival in the plan for the next day. The next day the focus was to recover bodies. A change of plan in the course of an action is always essential as that would help the team to focus on various issues and hence no issue would be left unaddressed. In order to bring out the bodies of the people who might have lost their lives due to the accident, the emergency management team used twenty divers and equipment like the side-scan sonar which was used to find submerged vehicles (@dhs.gov, 2007). There were two issues here, one was to find the bodies and the second was to find the vehicles as the probability of finding bodies in the vehicle was more. Using the divers and the side-scan sonar solves both the problems. Here the emergency management team should be appreciated for this work. Now analyzing this with the four phases of emergency management, the required work was done at time. Since the collapse of bridge was unexpected, the mitigation phase does not come in picture, however this would be discussed in some detail later. The emergency management task starts from the preparedness phase. The situation was tackled without any problem as the state people were well aware of their roles as a result of the training they took after the 9/11. Even response was quick. This phase which is considered as the most significant and delicate was handled aptly. The team was at the spot in six minutes and an emergency operations center was established in Minneapolis City Hall. The quick response time was a result of the 800 MHz mobile radio communication which was operating in Minneapolis (@dhs.gov). This aspect goes to the credit of department of homeland security and their preparedness. About fifty people were shifted to hospital within two hours. There was shortage of ambulance service and thereby some people had to be taken in trucks to the nearest hospital. This act is appreciable. Taking a wise decision at that time is one very important issue. Providing medical facility was the main criteria and that was possible because of small and effective steps like this. However, it is generally felt that ambulance service should have been more. Nevertheless, this act saved many lives and hence no issues over that. Eleven hospitals treated around ninety eight (98) victims in the first forty hours (@dhs.gov, 2007). Later, the recovery phase was started after successfully completing the response phase. The minimal recovery took three weeks and it is still under process till date. The parts of the bridge that collapsed were taken apart and new proposals were considered for the remake of the bridge. An extra lane was proposed to add to each side of the bridge and the decision to handover the responsibility of the construction work is seriously being considered. These works are being carried out at a rapid pace and that is quite appreciable. When an eight lane bridge collapsed and many people were victimized, the department of homeland security supported rescue. Action was initiated and the response was seen from over 75 various agencies which were state and local agencies (@dhs.gov, 2007). The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the USCG immediately went to rescue and opened a response co-ordination. The DHS also sent the external affairs staff to support the local authority. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Navy divers and Coast Guard also assisted the rescue operation. This effort has shown that the DHS was successful in making different government bodies work in co-operation at times of disasters. After the initial rescue, the cranes were used to make way for divers so that they have better access. Once the last person's remains were pulled out, the bridge's remnants were removed. Eighty out of eighty eight vehicles were moved out so that they can be claimed by owners. This summarizes that all actions taken by the team and this happens to be satisfactory. However, saying that there are a few issues to be considered. Was Mitigation Neglected There is a hidden side of this accident that could probably determine few areas where the DHS could not stand to its expectations. It is the mitigation phase. There were clear facts available about the bridge that directly implied a risk anytime. Here are a few such facts, the I-35W Bridge was being inspected every year by the Mn/Department of Transportation as it was one of the old bridges (@publicradio.org, 2007). Yearly reports were made from 1990 on wards. The year 2007's report was not made as some construction work was in progress. The Federal Government rated the bridge as structurally deficient bridge. The bridge was rated so as the bearings of it were corroded significantly. A bridge is called structurally deficient only when the bridge crosses the margin of safety and requires immediate attention. Hence, the I-35W Bridge showed lack of safety from many years. A study by the civil engineers of University of Minnesota showed the following problems. (@live.asce.org, 2007) Cracks in the cross girders of the bridge. Main trusses which were connected to these girders were leading to out-of-plane distortion. Stress cracking was anticipated. This study by the University of Minnesota suggested that the bridge had fatigue cracking problem and recommended frequent monitoring of the bridge's structure, strength and other issues of worry. According to the U.S. Department of transport the bridge was rated as structurally deficient in the year 2005 again and the issue of replacing the bridge with a new one was also raised (@publicradio.org, 2007). The cracking and fatigue problems were again highlighted. Another inspection record of the Federal National Bridge Inventory showed that I-35W bridge's score or rating was at the bottom of the nation wide bridge ratings. A bridge is rated on a scale of hundred with the maximum score of 100 and the least being zero (@msnbc.msn.com, 2007). The rating is given after a thorough inspection only. A rating of less than 80 upon 100 shows that there are a few issues to be solved and when the rating is 50 on 100 or less, it clearly indicates immediate attention and replacement with a new bridge is almost inevitable. The priority is set keeping in view various aspects of the bridge such as how frequently the bridge is used etc. Normally a bridge which is being used by more than 10000 vehicles per day is considered a heavily used bridge. It is painful to note that after having such informative statistics about the bridge; replacement was not initiated by the DHS who included Risk mitigation in their phases of action. Lying low at the bottom of rating of Federal National Bridge Inventory and being such a heavily used bridge, the care taken about it was not up to the mark. The measures and steps taken were not apt as they felt that the bridge was meeting the minimum standards of tolerance. In 2006 December, the bridge was planned to be repaired with steel reinforcement. But this was dropped as the safety inspection team felt that drilling the bridge would worsen the situation of it. Hence, minor works like the replacement of lights and repairing guard rails were being done. It was announced that the traffic would be limited only to one lane in each direction in order to facilitate the repair work but before it happened the bridge collapsed. There were 575000 pounds of construction supplies and equipment on bridge (@publicradio.org, 2007). The emergency response costed more than $ 8 million. The reaction from several civil engineers was simple and stressed on the need for proper maintenance of bridges. If it is not done there may be no surprise to see another bridge collapsing. Added to the above listed drawbacks, the bridge's site history reveals that water under the bridge has been polluted for many years (@publicradio.org, 2007). For ninety years, the Minneapolis Gas Works had operated on a twenty acre area on the bank of the river. Later this area was used by Continental Oil Company which dealt with the petroleum products. These resulted in large scale dumping of toxic waste. In 1991, the river clean up was done with over 15000 tons of polluted soil being removed just under the bridge. However, this was not the reason for the bridge's collapse but was surely an indicator of attention. Conclusion All this stats and information speaks simple language. When there was information available at such high standard about the possible risk, it's pathetic that nothing was done about risk mitigation. Old school book's thumb rule always says that prevention is better than cure. There are no issues regarding the response work of DHS to the accident. However, it can definitely be said that it failed to access the risk prior to the incident that could have possibly saved a lot of resources, both lives and money. True that Emergency management was pretty efficient after risk happened however, risk mitigation still suffers. The manner in which these actions were taken up by DHS would have been a boost for them after facing initial difficulties and heavy criticisms. However, saying this there is a lot of scope for improvement as seen with the stats mentioned above. Prioritizing and planning for Mitigation are very important tasks that DHS should never skip. References I-35W Bridge fact sheet, Minnesota Public radio, 03-08-2007, Retrieved from: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/08/03/bridge_background/rsssource=1 John A, I-35W Bridge Collapse Myths and Conspiracies, Weeks III, 06-08-2007 Retrieved from: http://www.johnweeks.com/i35w/i35wmyths.html Article on History and Heritage of Civil Engineering - American Society of Civil engineers, 2007 Retrieved from: http://live.asce.org/hh/index.mxmllid=158 Article showing detailed Information regarding the bridge's rating, 03-08-2007 Retrieved from: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20102713/ DHS action plan and rescue measures, September 2007, Information found at: http://www.dhs.gov/xprepresp/ Read More