Interstate 25 in southern Colorado is expected to reopen Thursday, four days after the main north-south route through the state was shut down when a train derailment caused by a broken rail collapsed a railroad bridge onto the highway and killed a truck driver, Gov. Jared Polis said Wednesday.
Polis toured the damage near Pueblo on Wednesday with local leaders and representatives with the National Transportation Safety Board. He also offered condolences to family and friends of Lafollette Henderson, the 60-year-old truck driver from Compton, California, who is survived by six children and 15 grandchildren.
The steel bridge, built in 1958, collapsed Sunday when 30 cars from a BNSF Railway train hauling coal derailed while crossing over I-25. Investigators are examining how the rail broke and why warning systems did not alert crews to the condition of the track, according to the NTSB.
A pro-Trump Minnesota judge declared a new state law restoring voting rights for convicted felons unconstitutional, drawing a sharp rebuke from Minnesota’s attorney general and secretary of state who said he overstepped his authority and urged residents to vote anyway.
Mille Lacs County District Judge Matthew Quinn declared the law unconstitutional in a pair of orders last week in which he sentenced two offenders to probation, but warned them they are not eligible to vote or register to vote — even though the law says they are. It was an unusual step because nobody involved in those cases ever asked him to rule on the constitutionality of the law.
In his orders, Quinn, concluded the Legislature’s passage of the law did not constitute the kind of “affirmative act” he said was needed to properly restore a felon’s civil rights. So he said he now has a duty going forward to “independently evaluate the voting capacity” of felons when they complete probation.
Attorney General Keith Ellison and Secretary of State Steve Simon said in a joint statement that Quinn’s orders “fly in the face of the Legislature’s passage of the Restore the Vote Act.”
A 9-mile (14-kilometer) stretch of I-25 — used by 39,000 to 44,000 vehicles daily — was shut down as crews cleared hundreds of tons of spilled coal and mangled railcars from the roadway. Traffic was being detoured around the derailment site and through the town of Penrose, almost 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Pueblo.
Tropical Storm Tammy formed Wednesday in the central tropical Atlantic and quickly moved westward, putting a group of islands on alert for its expected approach.
The National Hurricane Center said Tammy developed Wednesday afternoon and by the evening had winds of 40 mph (65 kph). Its center was located about 530 miles (855 kilometers) east of the Windward Islands.
Tammy was moving to the west at 17 mph (28 kph) and expected to remain a storm while brushing the islands of Barbados, Dominica, and Martinique and Guadeloupe, where storm tropical storm watches were in effect.
Tammy is expected to initially spread heavy rains over the northern Windward and Leeward Islands through Friday and then across the U.S. and British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico over the weekend, forecasters said.
Natalia Drill can be reached at dril7265@stthomas.edu.