a couple of witnesses have told me that they saw four people standing on the bridge just ten minutes before it collapsed. what happened to those four individuals is not clear at this point. where they off the bridge when it collapsed? what we what were they doing at the time. i can tell you within the last few minutes or so, we saw a crane out here attempting to move some is of the heavy concrete slabs that you see back here. they sort of stopped for the moment. but they were getting into place to move them presumably at some point they have to lift this up because again, there are at least half a dozen vehicles excuse me, half a dozen vehicles trapped underneath this pedestrian bridge. mia, let me be clear about this. the bridge was installed on saturday. it is not meant to be open for some time. i just spoke to brandon lee a student who said that the walkway to get up to the bridge wasn t in place. so if someone were on this bridge, they wouldn t be normal pedestrians, because th
something that they re building and it is not built correctly and why would you continue building something when there is traffic moving under you. that is not correct they did a horrible job because of their their stupidity and there are lost lives right now because they did not close down the street like they did five days ago when they start to build the bridge and they should have locked the street down so that incident wouldn t have happened. and maybe the bridge would have fell and there would be nobody and since they did do that, there are lives lost and families broken. they did a horrible job and thank god that wasn t under us. but it was a horrible experience and i can t it is traumatizing. let s go to mia rodriguez on the scene. what do you know? reporter: you heard that concern right there in that sound bite. why wasn t traffic stopped when they were working on this pedestrian bridge. this is the pedestrian bridge, you could see it right behind me. it is sort of f
what is the reaction of students on campus right now? everybody is in shock. everyone i have called and messages are coming in from all over the place, asking if i m all right and okay. we still don t know who was involved and just hoping everyone around 109 was clear of the bridge. but i know there are a lot of fatalities already so it is a tragic thing. are you how close are you to the bridge at the moment? right now i am blocked off. we were trying to get closer because we are right across from the bridge and everything is roped off and we can t get on to the campus. we re trying to figure out and get more information about what that what that rescue is doing. we have aerial shots right now. brandan, thank you for joining me. brandan lee is an fiu student who heard and saw the bridge collapse. i think we have mia rodriguez available for us. i will check because she s been talking to a lot of people in the area. mia, what you have been able to glean since we last talked?
happen. and although it is traumatizing, i think you wonder and ask yourself, could this have been avoided and i think it is just something that unfortunately it happens. thank you so much. we appreciate you talking to us. thank you. and explaining what you saw. and there you have it. just a chaotic situation. we ve been talking about this out here in miami for quite a bit. because again this bridge was sort of brought out here with such fanfare and such high hopes and then to have something like this happen just a complete shock to everyone who is out here today. mia, thank you very much. mia rodriguez on the scene for us with gabe guiterrez. this is a bridge that was built using accelerated bridge construction techniques and we ll talk more about that. but to washington for a moment. the white house press briefing is underway with sarah huckabee-sanders. let s listen in. as we ve said, we ll have conversations with specific countries but the decision will ultimately be ma
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