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June 13 (UPI) -- Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited the site of Sunday's fatal collapse of an elevated portion of I-95 in Philadelphia on Tuesday. Buttigieg said he met with first responders as well as state and local officials to hear updates about efforts to reconstruct the roadway.
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"We are here to help with funding, technical expertise and anything else needed to rebuild quickly," Buttigieg said.
He added that the Department of Transportation was working to make funding available to the state after Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an emergency declaration on Monday.
"There's no question in my mind that all the resources that PennDOT needs will be available. We've already made it clear that they are available ever since the governor's disaster declaration made it possible," Buttigieg said.
The highway is a major artery along the East Coast, running south to Miami and connecting New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C.
Buttigieg on Tuesday said trucks would need to find alternative routes as officials work to ensure goods move along the roadway as "efficiently as possible" while repairs are underway, but said it was necessary to complete repairs quickly.
"Obviously that is a lot of America's GDP moving along that road every single day," he said.
Construction crews continue to remove debris from the northbound lanes and have also started demolition on the southbound side.
Structural damage caused by the impact and subsequent explosion forced engineers to condemn elevated portions of the interstate in both directions, after discovering severe weaknesses in support beams. Investigators started focusing on intense heat as the likeliest cause of the collapse.
"You can very directly see in the burn marks and the twisted metal what the effects are when thousands of gallons of combustible fuel burn directly beneath a structure like this," Buttigieg said.
Both sections will need to be fully removed and replaced before the stretch of highway can fully reopen.
"I-95 will be impacted for a long time, for a long time," Philadelphia City Managing Director Tumar Alexander said Sunday.
Family members on Monday identified Nathaniel "Nate" Moody as the person killed in the collapse.
Moody, 53, reportedly drove the same route for years. His body was found in the wreckage of the tanker truck that caught fire on the ramp beneath the I-95 overpass.
The tanker truck reportedly lost control attempting to negotiate the curve of the ramp, according to police.
"Something caused the truck to lose control. What caused the truck to lose control is my question because I can't see him with everything he had to live for to lose it," Moody's cousin, Isaac Moody, told KYW-TV.
