the university had pushed for the construction of this bridge to safely be able to move students and faculty across that major thoroughfare from this city of the city of sweet water to the you ve and just a few days ago they swing it into place. that is how it is being described and they were looking forward to opening it up officially next year for use. the construction site that you see behind me, not necessarily related to the bridge. but they are going to be building some student housing and other things here which was part of the reason why they wanted this bridge in place before that happened. again in order to be able to move people from one side of the road to the other. but we ve had this tragedy out here today. a lot of questions why wasn t the road shut down. if they were in fact working on the bridge at that time. and was there some kind of structural deficiency involved in all of this. so to be clear, mia, the bridge for the use of pedestrians was not open yet? reporte
police that several people are dead as a result of this collapse. but it is not even clear they ve reached everybody just yet. nbc s mia rodriguez is live in miami. mia, what do you know about this? reporter: ali, we just go to the scene. you could see right behind me, this is the bridge collapse right here. right over there you could see it sort of bent down on to southwest eighth street. right now we are standing in the city of sweet water. this construction site is an area that they are building student housing. that was the impetuous for building this particular bridge in order to get students from this side of southwest eighth street to the main campus which is on the other side. this is a huge university. more than 50,000 students, it is a public university here in miami. joining me right now is jose mejia living here in the city of sweetwater which is where we are standing. you were out here having lunch and i ll remove this so you could hear. what did you hear and what did
today. one thing is you are absolutely correct. this bridge was just installed literally this past saturday at 4:00 in the morning. i was there for the unveiling ceremony. we had congressmen there and officials, and fiu was there and construction from mcm and this had a lot of fan base. a lot of push. and you also had some opposition. nonetheless, this is a moment where it is very tragic one. and i think we need to sit back and we need to analyze exactly how did this occur? did we wu rush into things an those are the types of things people will start asking. you just experienced it probably yourself and you saw somebody die out here today. did you ever think you would ever see anything like this happen out here, especially with pedestrians like this. you know, the ten-plus years i ve lived here in the city of sweetwater i could never imagine we could accomplish such a great thing and at the same time have such a such a catastrophe
data was available to us, 2016, the united states has a trade surplus of $12.5 billion with canada. correct. it is just a fact. and the canadians have the same number. so to say otherwise, it is absolutely patently a lie. peter alexander, thank you very much. yet another day in which the white house and the president are lying to the american people. if you are just joining us, police are confirming several people have died after a 950 ton pedestrian bridge collapsed near the campus of florida international university in sweetwater and part of miami. crushing multiple vehicles, one man described for us what the bridge collapse sounded like. here is what he said. it was like an explosion. it was like a bomb. it was right behind us and it could have been us under that bridge. thanks to god it wasn t. and unfortunately there are a lot of lives that are lost but they did a bad job constructing the bridge while there is traffic. because that is something that that is half there is
street trying to get at the scene and we saw a lot of police activity, couldn t get close enough to see the rescue and making our way to the north side, the corner of 107th and 16th street. that is north on the campus. and trying to make our way back to get a good vantage point. and a lot of traffic and weaving through traffic and so it is difficult so you are probably seeing the pictures from our affiliate and aerial as well to get a better vantage point than we are. we are trying to see what we can look at. gabe guiterrez in southern florida. this is miami, sweet water and miami-dade police and rescue are responding, but you could see vehicles partially and fully look at those two vehicles under the bridge on the top right of your screen. there are vehicles that are fully trapped under there. and we do not have a good read. we do know from miami-dade