A rush-hour crawl that gave vehicles little momentum to slide into the river and a bridge design that minimised falling debris appear to have kept the death toll relatively low in the collapse of a bridge into the Mississippi River.

US President George Bush plans to visit the site of a bridge collapse in Minneapolis today after Congress voted to direct $250m (€181m) for the structure to be rebuilt.

Officials in the US were warned as early as 1990 that a bridge which collapsed into the Mississippi River was “structurally deficient”.