Summary
After pedaling home to upload the audio to the paper's Web site, Nelson started banging out boilerplate public records requests to the state Department of Public Safety and local police agencies. No one was answering their phones, and phone numbers were hard to find even with the plethora of public records that we had at our fingertips, including driver's license and voter registration data, LexisNexis and property records. For one, I mined the inventory to show the strange history of the bridge's "sufficiency rating"-the overall condition rating assigned by the Federal Highway Administration, the arm of the U.S. Transportation Department responsible for rating bridges, maintaining the National Bridge Inventory and distributing money for replacement and rehabilitation.
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Extract
Making Every Resource Count
I was driving home from work that evening, just a little past 6 p.m., when several squad cars blazed past my left shoulder. Minutes later at home, my phone rang. "What do you know about bridges?" our new city editor asked.
I flipped on my television and saw where the police had been heading: the carnage of twisted metal, concrete, cars and horrified victims. The Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis had collapsed into the Mississippi River.It was Aug. 1, just hours from deadline. The St. Paul Pione...See the full content of this document
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