LITTLE ROCK — Three workers installing part of a water pipeline plunged 50 feet into the fast and cold Arkansas River on Wednesday from a construction platform slung underneath the Interstate 430 bridge, authorities said.
Rescue efforts quickly turned into a recovery operation when the three men, all fromTexas, were presumed to have drowned.
The 5,000-pound-plus platform, attached just south of the bridge's halfway point, gave way and landed in about 20 feet of water at 10:57 a.m.
Just before 7 p.m. workers using a crane pulled the scaffolding from the river. Only one body was found, Pulaski County Chief Deputy Coroner Garland Camper said.
Had the workers been following standard safety protocols, authorities said, they would have been tethered to the platform, which, despite their wearing life vests, was heavy enough to drag them underwater.
North Little Rock and Little Rock firefighters and the Pulaski County sheriff's office water patrol initially searched for the men but found nothing. Within two hours of the first 911 call - which came from a fourth worker on the bridge - authorities had already begun calling their efforts a recovery of dead bodies.
"We're going to persevere," North Little Rock Assistant Fire Chief Robert Mauldin said early in the afternoon. "We're going to keep looking. We're not going to leave anybody down there."
The fourth worker on the bridge, Charles Jackson, 41, of Dallas, said he was working as the crew's chief on Wednesday. He said he left for a moment to check on something and when he came back, the others and the platform were gone.
"These guys, man, just like brothers to me," he said, wearing a tattered red flannel shirt and rubbing his hard, weathered hands down his cheeks. "Just like family. I know their kids, and they know mine."
Jackson said all four worked for Oscar Renda Contracting, a Roanoke, Texas, company helping to build two 30-inch-wide pipelines for Central Arkansas Water. The company's $6.4 million pipeline project is part of a $43 million initiative to increase capacity for Jacksonville, Cabot, the North Pulaski Waterworks Association and Central Arkansas Water, all of which pooled the money to pay for it.
The four workers were building supports for the pipeline Wednesday, Jackson said.
"I can't believe I lost my guys," he said. "I can't believe I lost my guys."
Jackson offered the men's names - Elizar Lopez, Wilfrand Ruiz and Manuel Flores Silva - which authorities said they would not confirm before bodies were recovered. Terry Brem, Oscar Renda Contracting's safety director, said relatives of the workers had been notified, but he declined to confirm the workers' names, ages or any employment details.
Using a depth finder, a sheriff's office river patrol boat found the platform directly beneath where it had been attached to the bridge, Lt. Tim Hibbs said.
"Just your basic fish finder," he said. "We were looking all over, and it was right there, straight down."
Hibbs and Mauldin said sending divers down would do nothing but endanger the divers - the river was simply moving too fast.
"We can get a diver down in up to 75,000 cubic feet of water per second, and today this river's moving at 212,000 cubic feet per second," Mauldin said. "We just can't do it."
A plan to place a barge alongside the wreckage to raise it or tow it so divers could inspect it was scuttled despite hours of phone calls and negotiations.As afternoon stretched toward evening, authorities arranged to get a crane and closed two lanes of northbound I-430 traffic for the work to recover the heavy platform.
Shortly before 6 p.m., the crane pulled onto the bridge and lowered a cable for attachment to the wreckage under the bridge.
Two attempts to raise the scaffolding failed when the anchor used to grapple onto the platform slipped free of it. After about an hour, workers were able to attach a cable directly to the scaffold.
As the crane raised the scaffolding clear of the strong current, dozens of bystanders lined both sides of River Mountain Drive on the south shore of the river, using binoculars to observe the scene.
The scaffolding was taken by the barge to the Yacht Club upstream while a boat belonging to the sheriff's office carried the body to shore.
Authorities said the body was not tethered to the platform but had become entangled in ropes and the scaffolding's wreckage.
Tess Harrison, 43, a volunteer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said she would see the workers leave every morning in a small boat from Cook's Landing in North Little Rock to head over to the work site.
"Such great guys," she said. "One of them, I have to tell you, was just the happiest man alive. I'd see him at 5:30 in the morning and he was laughing. They'd get back at 6, 6:30 at night, and there he was, still laughing."
She said she spent a half-hour on the bridge with binoculars after the accident, looking for anything that might help, including the life vests - one blue and the others orange - that the three missing men wore.
"This is just about as horrible as it could be," she said.
SAFETY PLAN
Oscar Renda Contracting won its construction contract in April 2006 and began work that fall, according to Central Arkansas Water. The utility expected work on this phase to end by September.
The utility's chief operating officer, Thad Luther, said in an interview that the contract included a safety plan. Though Luther said he was unfamiliar with the plan, he said such documents usually contain a clause making the contractor responsible for ensuring safety and for complying with federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules.
More details on the Texas company's contract were unavailable Wednesday, Luther said, because the person with access to the safety plan was at the work site.
Last year Central Arkansas Water obtained a permit from the state Highway and Transportation Department to install the pipeline on the bridge. The permit, issued March 20, 2007, was good for a year. It wasn't clear Wednesday whether Central Arkansas Water was granted an extension or was issued another permit.
The permit holds the permit holder responsible for anything that happens on the project. The permit requires that the "installation of facilities covered by this permit shall conform to the requirements of applicable federal, state, local, industry, health and safety codes."
Further, the permit requires that "Central Arkansas [Water] or their representative will hold harmless the Department or its employees from any liability for any and all work on highway right of way."
Central Arkansas Water also was required to put up $250,000 as a guarantee to pay for any damage to the bridge that the work might cause.
OSHA officials were on the scene Wednesday and said they had already opened an investigation, said Diana Petterson, spokesman with the agency's Dallas office. She said OSHA has six months to complete its investigation and violations uncovered can result in citations and fines.
Petterson said OSHA only performs inspections after events such as complaints, deaths, or injuries to more than three people requiring hospitalization. The agency also does spot inspections within an industry, she said, when that industry has a high rate of injury or illness.
In the past five years, OSHA completed seven investigations of Oscar Renda Contracting construction jobs in Texas. Inspectors found five total workplace violations in three of seven visits, according to agency records.
Violations included failure to follow standards for excavation and failure to follow requirements for protective systems at a construction site in Cedar Park, Texas, in July 2007. In Allen, Texas, in September 2005, OSHA found the company did not provide air monitoring or communications systems for employees who entered a 6-footdiameter water pipe and also did not provide sufficient protective equipment.
Six months earlier, OSHA cited Oscar Renda Contracting for not following requirements for protective systems in Austin, Texas.
For those five violations, OSHA records show, the company settled and paid fines totaling $5,800.
Brem, the firm's safety director, declined comment on the company's safety record.
He said he arrived Wednesday in Little Rock to assist in the company's own investigation into the accident. In an interview on his cell phone, he said he could say nothing about the company's equipment nor anything about the safety standards the company uses.
"Right now, we don't have any information to give out," he said. "The investigation is not complete. It is going to be a while."Information for this article was contributed by Michelle Hillen, Kristin Netterstrom, Jim Brooks and Noel E. Oman of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1, 9 on 04/03/2008