John Barry and Alexandra Iannitelli of Thornton Tomasetti, Inc., the international engineering firm with practices in building structure, building skin and building performance, were recently named two “New Faces of Civil Engineering” by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

Experts hired by attorneys for victims of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse say the National Transportation Safety Board got the cause of the disaster wrong, their lead attorney said Wednesday.

Thanks to federal largesse and the Legislature’s only override of a Tim Pawlenty veto, Minnesota now boasts the most aggressive highway bridge repair and replacement program in the nation.

Contradicting the National Transportation Safety Board’s report that blamed too-thin gusset plates for the Aug. 1, 2007, collapse of the Minneapolis Interstate 35W bridge, an independent analysis has concluded that rusted, frozen roller bearings prevented thermal expansion and caused a truss chord to fail, triggering the gusset-plate failure. The analysis by Thornton Tomasetti, New York City, using forensic bridge information modeling, was presented to victims’ families and will be deployed in an anticipated lawsuit

Lawyers for more than 100 bridge collapse victims say the National Transportation Safety Board reached the wrong conclusion about the 35W bridge collapse. A consortium of lawyers hired the international consulting firm Thorton Tomasetti to investigate the collapse. The firm also investigated the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Experts from engineering consultancy Thornton Tomasetti believe that the initiating event wasn’t the fracture of a key gusset plate in the bridge, but the failure of a horizontal beam.

An engineering firm hired by attorneys for victims of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse says the cause of the disaster was not undersized gusset plates but the failure of a nearby beam, a lawyer for the victims said Wednesday. The firm’s findings directly contradict the conclusion reached by the National Transportation Safety Board.

The National Transportation Safety Board got the cause of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse wrong, the lead lawyer for most victims of the disaster asserted. The lawyer, Chris Messerly, said experts from the engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti Inc. told survivors and families of victims Tuesday night that the “initiating event” was not the fracture of a key gusset plate in the Minneapolis bridge, as the safety board concluded, but the failure of a horizontal beam called a chord.

In a sign of the intensifying political turmoil surrounding the investigation of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse, Congress will publicly question the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) next month about its investigation, including the agency’s refusal to hold a hearing of its own.

Bridge engineers and software providers are adapting and customizing building information modeling techniques for everything from new designs to forensics. But an industry-wide standard for such modeling remains to be seen.