"I'm confident that they'll find the cause of this," said Gene Corley, a private engineer who has investigated numerous disasters including the World Trade Center collapse on Sept. 11, 2001.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-05-minnesotabridge_N.htm

"We normally don't like to get involved unless we have assurances that we are given a free hand to really perform a thorough and totally unbiased investigation..." Velivasakis says.

His firm, Thornton Tomasetti, specializes in stabilizing disaster sites and determining why structures collapse.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/10/22/investigator/

Did anyone else think the Minnesota bridge collapse was rather strange? All 1900 ft of the bridge fell, including the lengthy approach sections built over dry land on BOTH sides of the river. Unfortunately, the link I had to the security camera video of the collapse is no longer working, but what I found very odd about it was that the entire 1900 ft span (or as much of it as you could see) appears to begin falling almost simultaneously. It looks like the entire bridge surface begins to drop at virtually the same moment. There isn't a domino-type sequence of cause and effect taking down the bridge, one section after another. It all happens at once. That seems (to me) like a very strange consequence of a gusset plate fatigue failure at a single location. It also looks like the traffic was light to medium on the bridge -- not bumper-to-bumper, as originally reported.

There's also the matter of Keith Ellison, America's first and only Muslim congressman from Minneapolis, who had compared 9/11 to the Reichtag Fire and Bush to Hitler. Two hours after a groveling retraction on CNN's Situation Room, the bridge collapsed and Ellison was soon begging Bush for federal funds for his Congressional district. He referred to his earlier remarks as a "rookie mistake". A rookie at what?

Here's a link to his capitulation appearance on CNN:

http://everyzing.com/viewMedia.jsp?index=1&start=0&mc=en-vid&il=en&col=en-vid-public-ep&q=9%2F11&num=10&filter=1&match=que...