More bodies recovered in US bridge wreck

MINNEAPOLIS (AFP) - Three bodies including a toddler and her pregnant mother were found in the wreckage of a bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi river, bringing the overall death toll to eight, medical officials and local media said Friday.

At least five more people are still missing and presumed dead from the disaster in the northern US state of Minnesota. The toll updated earlier reports Thursday that the remains of just two people had been found.

One of the bodies was identified as Peter Joseph Hausmann, a former missionary who had worked in Kenya. The 47-year-old father of four was from Rosemount, a suburb near Minneapolis, the local medical examiner's office said.

The two other bodies were not yet officially identified, the Hennepin County sheriff's office said, but a local newspaper named them Friday.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune quoted a source within the sheriff's office as saying the bodies were that of a 20-month-old girl, Hanah Sahal, and her mother, Sadiya Sahal, a 23-year-old Somali immigrant who was studying to become a nurse. They had been listed among the missing.

Sahal was pregnant, officials have said. The paper also quoted unnamed sources as saying that Hausmann may have been trying to rescue the child and mother beneath the murky waters of the Mississippi River when he died.

Dive crews continue to search the wreckage as the debris is slowly cleared away. Investigators said Wednesday they had identified a possible design flaw in the gusset plates, which help tie steel beams together.

The National Transportation Safety Board has also found several fractures in the bridge superstructure "but nothing that looked to be the initiating location."

The collapse of the eight-lane bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 1 drew fresh calls for a major overhaul of aging US infrastructure, with experts saying billions had to be spent to bring standards into line.

Officials had warned as early as 1990 that the bridge, which bears more than 140,000 vehicles a day, had serious structural problems.

The American Society of Civil Engineers warned in a report two years ago that between 2000 and 2003, more than 27 percent of the nation's almost 600,000 bridges were rated as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

The White House has initiated a review of the nation's state-based bridge inspection program but rejected calls for a gasoline tax to pay for infrastructure improvements.