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CONCORD — Rust may have weakened the bridge that broke and spilled coolers, grills and more than 100 people into a pile on a highway Saturday night at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.
A concrete pedestrian bridge partially collapsed onto U.S. 29 at 11:15 p.m., just after The Winston night race ended. An 80-foot section of the 320-foot-long bridge broke midway between two support posts and landed on the two southbound lanes of the divided highway.
In all, at least 101 people were taken to five hospitals, NorthEast Medical Center in Concord, Rowan Regional Medical Center and three hospitals in Charlotte — Carolinas Medical Center and Presbyterian and University hospitals.
No one was killed, though more than 50 remained hospitalized Sunday — one in critical condition — said Humpy Wheeler, president of the racetrack’s parent company, Speedway Motorsports.
“Our prayers, our thoughts, our sympathies go out to the injured and their families,” Wheeler told a crowd of reporters gathered in the middle of closed U.S. 29 Sunday afternoon. “ ... This is the worst thing you can go through, when spectators are hurt.”
Fortunately, N.C. Highway Patrol troopers had stopped car traffic immediately after the race, so the roadway under the crosswalk was clear at the time of the collapse.
Speedway Motorsports has hired engineers who reconstruct building accidents to study how the bridge failed, Wheeler said. The N.C. Department of Transportation is conducting its own investigation.
“We do not know what happened to the bridge at this point, and any rumors flying around are just that,” Wheeler said. “We don’t have the facts yet, and we are not going to speculate as to what happened to this bridge.
“ ... There are a lot of bridges like this all over the United States that are perfectly safe.”
Don Idol, a bridge engineer for the N.C. Department of Transportation, said rust on metal cables encased inside the concrete slabs of the bridge may have weakened the bridge. The prestressed concrete slabs in the $1-million bridge were installed by Tindall Corp. of Spartanburg, S.C., when the bridge was built in 1995.
Idol said that moisture may have formed on the cables during construction of the bridge. An executive with Tindall Corp. declined to comment this morning.
Idol also said he had noticed three to five cracks — each about three feet long and as narrow as a 16th of an inch — in other areas underneath part of the bridge that is still standing.
The speedway paid to build the bridge and owns it, but by law, the state inspects such bridges every two years. The Department of Transportation had inspected the bridge when it was built, but Idol and other state officials did not know the last time it was inspected.
Dispelling rumors, Wheeler said a golf cart was the only vehicle ever to cross the bridge, which was designed to hold 100 pounds per square foot. A backhoe scraped the underside of a duplicate pedestrian bridge 500 yards away on Saturday but probably not the one that collapsed, he also said.
The race track will close the other bridge, built in 1996, until after qualifying races Wednesday so it can test its strength.
The bridges allow spectators — there were 180,000 Saturday night — to cross the busy highway from parking lots to the race track. Without them, some of 183 state troopers who work at the raceway during events must stop cars periodically and escort waves of visitors across the four-lane federal highway.
Sunday, a backhoe and 70-ton crane moved debris off the highway before heavy rain fell Sunday night, allowing rush hour traffic to pass this morning.
This is the third time in three years that tragedy has struck the speedway.
Last May, a crash on the track sent a wheel flying into the stands, killing three spectators and injuring eight. Victims’ families settled a lawsuit with Lowe’s Motor Speedway earlier this month. In May 1998, five people died when a helicopter struck a power line as it flew from the race track to an airport in Monroe.
“I’ve driven under that bridge a thousand times and I’ve crossed it a couple of hundred going out to the souvenir area for autographs,” Winston Cup driver Sterling Marlin said. “There hasn’t been a single time when I’ve thought anything about it.”
Sitting outside his camper near the speedway Sunday afternoon, Dan Lundrigan, of Hudson, N.H., said Saturday’s tragedy will likely pull race fans closer together.
A NASCAR fan all of his life, Lundrigan said the sport has survived many tragedies during the past few years.
Because most of the fans following NASCAR are families, they tend to pull together to support the sport in hard times.
“NASCAR fans are a really different breed of sports fans,” he said.
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Staff writers Jennifer Moxley and Jill McCartney contributed to this article.
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