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The bridge had undergone inspection last September, but J. William Burns, Connecticut's transportation commissioner, suggested a likely cause of collapse: a structurally crucial steel pin, 10 in. long and 7 in. in diameter that, he said, "is missing or sheared off." The accident has already prompted unscheduled bridge inspections and maintenance in several states. As well it should: the Federal Government says that of 564,499 U.S. bridges, 21% are "obsolete" and 23% are "structurally deficient." Officially, the Mianus River Bridge was neither.
In the Southwest, five lives have been claimed so far by the swift Colorado River, which is sluicing over dikes, sandbag barriers and splashboards. William Wert was on a raft excursion with 14 other vacationers shooting the Grand Canyon's Crystal Rapids when the 33-ft. rubber raft flipped; all passengers except Wert made it to shore. Farther downstream on the 1,450-mile river, in Mexico, four people drowned. "We cannot blame the Americans," said Francisco Gonzales, deputy police chief of the town of Luis B. Sanchez. "They did not make the rain and snow that are causing the river to rise."
American officials do, however, attempt to manage the Colorado, and in the process have been forced to trigger much of the flooding. Engineers at the Glen Canyon and Parker dams have had to open their floodgates wider than ever before. Last winter's Rocky Mountain snowpack was up to three times its usual thickness, and since Memorial Day it has been melting unusually fast. Southwesterners blame Bureau of Reclamation dam managers for not releasing more of the runoff earlier. Says William Claypool of Needles, Calif.: "Anyone over the age of eight who watched TV this winter should have known we would have problems."
Heavy thunderstorms last week made matters worse. Water was rushing out of the Glen Canyon spillway at about 700,000 gal. per sec., more than twice as fast as normal. With Lake Mead rising to record levels, water was about to surge over the spillways at Hoover Dam for the first time since they were tested in 1941.
To the north, in Grand Junction, Colo., floods broke a dike and prompted the evacuation of more than 1,300 residents. Downstream, hundreds of houses and businesses in Arizona and California river settlements were flooded, and vital tourist business was badly crimped. "This is a man-made disaster, and there's no excuse for it," says Sandy Fields, owner of the Castle Rock Shores Resort in hard-hit Parker, Ariz. "It's just plain stupidity."
In March, Government computers forecast that the snowmelt would be 4% below normal. A month ago, they predicted 31% above. The most recent predicted overflow: 110%. "Our estimates," admits Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Robert Broadbent, "were wrong. The flows this year just didn't fit into that computer model. It was winter clear up to the 20th of May, and then all of a sudden it turned to summer."