MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – Crews pulled a car Tuesday from the wreckage dumped into the Mississippi River by the collapse of a highway bridge, clearing the way for Navy divers to search for bodies in the debris and murky water.

Navy Senior Chief David Nagle said the presence of 15 Navy divers and a five-member command team provides greater experience and more sophisticated technology than local emergency dive squads. Searchers have been unable to find the at least eight people missing since the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed into the water near downtown Minneapolis last week.

“Right now we’re here to assess, and we’re standing by to support as requested,” Chief Nagle said.

“Now it’s time to start going through the debris,” Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek had said earlier of the Navy divers. “My folks are not salvage experts, and that’s why I brought in the ones that are, the Navy.”

Authorities pulled a car out of the river, but there were no bodies inside. Hennepin County Sheriff’s Captain Bill Chandler said the vehicle was removed to make room for the Navy dive operation.

FBI dive teams had also arrived, with equipment that includes a small submarine equipped with a robotic arm.

On land, workers have begun moving heavy construction equipment into position to eventually hoist away the tons of concrete and steel bridge wreckage.

In addition to the missing, there are five known dead. Among the injured, four people were upgraded Tuesday to serious condition, leaving one still in critical condition, said Christine Hill, a spokeswoman for Hennepin County Medical Center.

The city asked residents to observe a moment of silence Tuesday evening at the minute the bridge fell, and bells at churches and City Hall were to toll immediately after.

Teams of designers and builders are racing to meet a dawn Wednesday deadline for showing they are qualified to bid on the bridge replacement project, which the state has put on a fast track.

State transportation officials hope to award contracts next month, with the goal of having a new bridge standing at the end of 2008.

A severe winter could throw off the state’s reconstruction schedule. But other conditions are favorable – including a construction industry with plenty of available resources to take on such a daunting challenge.

“It is doable. It is a bit fast, but this is an emergency,” said Khaled Mahmoud with the Bridge Engineering Association in New York. “And if we are ever good at anything, it’s responding to emergencies.”

Erecting such a bridge would ordinarily take about three years, even if the design and building phases were overlapped to save time, said Bill Cox, owner of Corman Construction Inc. in Annapolis Junction, Md., a road and bridge construction firm.

The goal of awarding contracts in mid-September is highly ambitious given the array of questions to be answered, including whether to mimic the former bridge’s alignment, how much traffic to accommodate, how much to spend and what it will look like.

The state intends to write financial incentives into the contract to make the compressed schedule more likely to be met.
Similar incentives helped traffic begin moving in December on one of the parallel three-mile Interstate 10 bridges over Escambia Bay in Pensacola, Fla. The $242 million project is replacing bridges damaged by 2004’s Hurricane Ivan.

The bridge’s design will largely determine the cost, and although the federal government has pledged $250 million, Mahmoud said $300 million to $350 million “sounds about right.”

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Associated Press writers Brian Bakst and Doug Glass contributed to this report.