Sverdrup & Parcel

Sverdrup & Parcel was an American civil engineering company formed in 1928 by Leif J. Sverdrup and his college engineering professor John I. Parcel. The company worked primarily in a specialty field of bridges. The company's headquarters was located in St. Louis, Missouri. The firm was the designer of the ill-fated I-35W Mississippi River bridge, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1964 (collapsed on August 1, 2007). The official report by the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the bridge collapse on a design error by the firm, resulting in the gusset plates having inadequate load capacity. Some other well-known projects of Sverdrup & Parcel include: Amelia Earhart Bridge 1939, Atchison, Kansas Sidney Lanier Bridge 1956, Brunswick, Georgia Bridge of the Americas 1962 (also known as Puente de las Américas, Thatcher Ferry Bridge), Panama, crosses the Panama Canal Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, (also known as Lucius J. Kellam, Jr. Bridge-Tunnel) completed in 1964, and named one of the "Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World" shortly thereafter. Busch Memorial Stadium 1966, St. Louis, Missouri Angostura Bridge 1967, Bolivar, Venezuela, crosses the Orinoco River Hearnes Center 1972, Columbia, Missouri Louisiana Superdome 1975, New Orleans, Louisiana Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel 1992, in Newport News, Virginia Sverdrup & Parcel was succeeded by Sverdrup Civil, which in 1999 was part of the merger between Sverdrup and Jacobs Engineering.