After working for five years to acquire remnants of the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed in 2007, the St. Thomas School of Engineering obtained several steel pieces this month.

Don Weinkauf, the St. Thomas professor and School of Engineering dean, who lead the effort to get the parts, said St. Thomas’ 35W bridge display is meant to serve as a reminder to engineering students about the serious implications of their work.

“It’s a very stark reminder of the responsibilities that engineers have,” Weinkauf said. “Everything that engineers do, in terms of designing and building and creating, will touch peoples’ lives and some in very powerful ways like this.”

St. Thomas’ piece of the 35W bridge is a unit called the U10W, which is a “mirror image” of the piece that many considered the one that failed and caused the collapse.

“What’s thought to have failed is the sister piece on the south side of the bridge, and we have the exact same joint from the north side of the bridge,” Weinkauf said.

The U10W unit was originally one piece, but St. Thomas owns three separate components that were ripped apart when the bridge collapsed.

“The distortion of the metal, the yielding of the steel on pieces of this scale is just very stunning … to see the forces that were at play that day,” Weinkauf said.

Senior engineering major Nick Haugen said the incident’s proximity makes the pieces more meaningful to St. Thomas students.

“In the first engineering courses, we learn about engineering disasters throughout history, but most of them are far in the past,” Haugen said. “Every engineer in the program was alive during this bridge collapse, and the fact that most of us are from around the (Twin Cities) makes it hit extra close to home.”

Weinkauf said students should take this lesson to heart.

“There are many examples of engineering failures from around the world, so I don’t think it’s unique in that sense,” Weinkauf said. “But the fact that it’s in our backyard is really what makes this so powerful.”

The mangled bridge pieces rest behind Brady Educational Center, and Weinkauf said the university is finding a site to display the pieces.

“We’ll reassemble it roughly in a way that the three pieces will be together again,” Weinkauf said. “This will be a pretty sizeable reconstruction. Probably it will be about 7- or 8-feet tall, 2-feet thick and maybe 10- to 12-feet long.”

The Minnesota House of Representatives passed legislation in May that gave the Minnesota Department of Transportation guidance on how the debris should be moved. St. Thomas could not possess any piece of the bridge until that legislature went through.

“We were just occasionally inquiring and inquiring and inquiring, and eventually this legislation passed that really defined for MnDOT how they can distribute the steels,” Weinkauf said.

Since the legislation passed, all the steel that once lay in a field in Afton, Minn. has either been given to universities or to a reprocessing facility. The University of Minnesota and Purdue University are the only other schools to ask for and receive bridge parts.

“Now, it’s gone,” Weinkauf said. “The field is completely empty. It’s all been chopped up and sent over to Wisconsin to be reprocessed.”

Junior engineering major Courtney King said the 35W bridge collapse was part of the reason she decided to become an engineer.

“I think this display would be a good reminder of just how important our job as engineers is,” King said. “Engineers have such a huge impact on society, and it’s critical that we take our education seriously to one day be able to help the people around us.”

Molly Sigler can be reached at sigl1215@stthomas.edu.