ST. PAUL (AP) -- It cost more than $1,000 per step, but officials are defending the $157,000 cost of a temporary staircase built at the site of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse.
The stairway was built to help demolition and recovery workers and others get down to the river's edge in the days after the Aug. 1 disaster in downtown Minneapolis, which killed 13 people and injured 100.
"Temporary staircases probably shouldn't cost that much," said Rep. Jeremy Kalin, DFL-North Branch, a member of the Minnesota House's Transportation Finance Committee. "It's emblematic of a larger rush to push things ahead without stopping and taking a breath and saying, 'Can we do this cheaper and more wisely?"'
With construction now under way on the replacement bridge, part of the 120-step staircase has been dismantled, and snow covers the steps.
But Minnesota Department of Transportation spokeswoman Lucy Kender told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that the stairs were necessary. She said they were expensive because they had to be built to federal safety standards, and workers were paid overtime because the stairs were needed in a hurry.
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The staircase was built after officials observed demolition crews, rescue workers and others having difficulty moving from a staging area on top of the bluff down to the Mississippi River's edge.
"It had been a week of this, people slipping and sliding up and down the embankment, and we just said, 'This has got to stop,"' Kender said.
The project was not put out to bid, Kender said. Instead, Bolander & Sons, the St. Paul-based company that won a multimillion-dollar contract to clear the wreckage of the bridge, subcontracted the staircase work to Graham Penn-Co. Construction, which had no fewer than 15 people working on the project, according to invoices submitted to the state.
Kender said the stairs were worth the price to keep people from getting hurt, which would have added to the state's costs.
"If they'd been going up and down that embankment and got hurt in any way, you're automatically going into workers' compensation" and other expenses, Kender said.
Despite the thousands of tons of twisted steel and broken concrete, construction, government, utility and other personnel worked in excess of 117,000 hours following the collapse without major injury, according to documents provided by MnDOT.
Bolander, the company that did most of the work on the site, backed that up.
"We had one person that had to get stitches in his finger, but that's it," Bolander President Mark Ryan said.
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Ryan also pointed out that many people used the stairs, including Navy divers who searched for bodies of the victims in the treacherous waters, and U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters.
"It was needed at the time," he said.
