As bridge investigation continues, two victims recovered

MINNEAPOLIS -- Divers pulled at least two more bodies from the wreckage of the collapsed Mississippi River bridge Thursday, bringing the disaster's confirmed death toll to seven, more than a week after the span crumbled.

Later, authorities said one of those sets of remains might actually include another victim, which would bring the toll to eight if that is confirmed.

Crews have been searching for at least eight people missing and presumed killed in the collapse, including a mother and her young daughter and another woman and her adult son.

As searchers combed the river for victims, federal officials looking into the cause of the collapse issued an advisory for states to inspect the metal plates, or gussets, that hold girders together on bridges nationwide.

Investigators said the gussets on the failed Minneapolis bridge were originally attached with rivets -- old technology more likely to slip than the bolts used in bridges today.

Some of the gussets also may have been weakened by welding work over the years, and some may have been too thin, engineering experts said Thursday.

Also Thursday, President Bush dismissed a proposal to raise the federal gasoline tax to repair the nation's bridges at least until Congress changes the way it spends highway money and considers the economic impact of a tax increase.

Questions about the gussets prompted Transportation Secretary Mary Peters to caution states about stress placed on bridges during construction projects.

Investigators are also looking at whether extra weight from construction work could have affected the bridge. An 18-person crew had been working on the Interstate 35W span when it collapsed during the evening rush hour.

Bruce Magladry, director of the National Transportation Safety Board's Office of Highway Safety, said the agency will use a computer to simulate how the bridge might have behaved with different loads, and with different parts of the bridge failing. He said there are infinite combinations to test, so the simulation may have to be run 50 times or 5,000 times.

"Then we compare what the (simulated) collapse looks like to what we actually see out there on the ground," Magladry said, and repeat the simulation until it matches what happened.

NTSB investigators have been trying to pinpoint where on the bridge the collapse began. Observations from a helicopter camera this week found several "tensile fractures" in the superstructure on the north side of the bridge, but nothing that appeared to show where the collapse began, the NTSB said.

At the bridge site, recovery crews have removed several vehicles from the river in the past two days. In all, 88 vehicles have been located, both in the river and amid the broken concrete wreckage of the bridge.

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Associated Press writers Archie Ingersoll in Minneapolis and Frederic J. Frommer and Jennifer Loven in Washington contributed to this report.