State sues its I-35 bridge consultant

The suit notes that URS Corp., the San Francisco-based company that held three contracts to inspect the bridge and suggest modifications, had assured the state of its expertise in assessing the need for repairs and the best way to go about them.

But the state's suit also included a potentially revealing memo from URS.

"We will not calculate actual capacities of all of the connections since that is too much work, although that provides the most accurate results,'' the firm wrote in March 2006. "Instead, we will do some approximate but conservative adjustments to the member capacities per [the] design specifications."

The suit also reports that a note from an internal URS meeting in 2005 states, "Gusset Plate Buckling -- If this occurs, it is not catastrophic."

The National Transportation Safety Board report issued in November 2008, however, determined that the gusset plates installed when the bridge was built in the 1960s were too thin, and the failure of the plates was a likely cause when the bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River shortly after 6 p.m. on Aug. 1, 2007.

URS, the state contends in its suit, failed in its responsibilities to inspect, analyze and evaluate the bridge and "violated the applicable engineering standard of care."

A URS spokesman reacted strongly Thursday to the lawsuit. "It is disappointing that the state of Minnesota has chosen to sue URS, especially in light of the state's earlier admissions that URS is not responsible for the bridge collapse," said Ronald Low, a company spokesman. "We intend to vigorously defend ourselves."

The company, which has generally declined to comment since the tragedy, added that the NTSB's own findings had pointed to both the bridge's original flawed design and the spacing of materials on the bridge as part of a construction project as causes for the collapse.

"URS was not involved in the original design or building of the bridge, nor was it involved in any of the subsequent construction work," Low said.

Complicated relationship

The state's suit is being closely watched because it will likely illuminate the complicated relationship the state's Department of Transportation had with the company.

Don Flemming, the state's longtime bridge engineer, left his state job in 2000 to work for URS and then negotiated a consulting contract between the company and MnDOT over the bridge. Less than a year before the bridge fell, as MnDOT was facing funding pressures, state officials rejected a $2 million steel plate reinforcment recommended by URS.

In the suit, state officials said URS' contract "clearly" required the company to develop tension and compression failure criteria for the bridge's many components -- including the bridge's steel gusset plates -- using data from how they were supposed to be designed.

With Gov. Tim Pawlenty and others set to observe the second anniversary of the collapse on Saturday, MnDOT spokesman Kevin Gutknecht said the agency would not comment on the suit, which was filed in Hennepin County on Wednesday and alleged negligence and breach of contract by URS. In November, as the first suits by the collapse victims were filed, MnDOT had said that it did not consider URS to be in breach of its contract.

In the suit, the state also asked to have URS reimburse more than $37 million in payments made by the state from special victims compensation funds. In addition, it asked that URS reimburse any damages the state may have to pay Progressive Contractors Inc., the construction company whose workers were on the bridge the day it fell.

With a flurry of lawsuits over the collapse filed by victims and others, the state's legal stance regarding URS has drawn special interest.

Kyle Hart, an attorney for PCI, said the state appeared to be acting to meet a two-year legal deadline for filing suits related to the bridge collapse. "It's clear to me, that's what motivated MnDOT,'' he said.

"This is a good step for the taxpayers of Minnesota," said Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, who helped author the legislation creating the victims compensation fund. "It appears that URS is culpable to a significant degree. Just because someone consults for the state doesn't mean that they don't make mistakes or errors.

"The consultant will probably say it was the state that took [URS'] information and didn't do what they were supposed to do with it," Latz added.

But others said the suit was likely to raise at least as many questions as it answered.

Sen. Kathy Saltzman, DFL-Woodbury, a member of a legislative panel that studied the collapse, said MnDOT has never fully explained several key aspects of its relationship with the company -- including controversial photos taken by the consultant years earlier that appeared to show a bowed gusset plate on the bridge.

Saltzman said that when legislators asked MnDOT why it did not immediately react to the photos, a MnDOT official said in an e-mail exchange between legislators and MnDOT that a URS report containing the photos "did not indicate ... a problem with bowing of the gusset plates."

The MnDOT official added that "in order to ascertain if there was bowing of gusset plates on the I-35W bridge, a physical measurement would need to be taken."

Saltzman said of the e-mail, "When you look at that picture, [you think] 'Oh, that doesn't look right.' [and ask], did you do the physical measurement just to determine there is not a reason for concern?"

Staff writer Jim Foti contributed to this report. Mike Kaszuba • 651-222-1673