Climbers Found Alive on Mt. Hood; Economy on Minds of Michigan Voters; Results of Bridge Collapse Investigation to Be Released
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Well, it's a big state with big problems, but Michigan could be a big prize for a certain Republican presidential contender. Among Democrats, not so much.</s>DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Got a beef with cloned cows or pigs? Or goats? Well, the government doesn't. And our medical unit serves up the details. Hello, everyone. I'm Don Lemon live at the CNN world headquarters in Atlanta.</s>PHILLIPS: And I'm Kyra Phillips. You're live in the</s>CNN NEWSROOM. LEMON: First we start with some breaking news. Right at our news desk, Betty Nguyen working on a developing story. It involves those hikers?</s>BETTY NGUYEN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. A desperate search has been underway for these hikers off of Mt. Hood. Two climbers, in fact, went missing on Monday. And we have just learned that they have been found, and they are alive. In fact we've learned that they spent the night Monday night in a snow cave, but once the weather cleared, they were able actually to get a cell phone call out to one of the climbers' girlfriends. And then the local sheriff's department used that cell phone signal to track their location. Right now an 18-member rescue crew is en route in the climbers' location right now to try to get them off of Mt. Hood. And this is really great news, Don, because if you recall back in 2006, three out-of-state climbers died on Mt. Hood when they got caught in a blizzard. And obviously, it's very cold up there right now. In fact, they had to spend the night in a snow cave. But the good news is that they, hopefully, will be headed home very shortly, because the two missing climbers have been found on Mt. Hood, and a rescue team is headed their way right now to bring them down.</s>LEMON: Very good news, yes. And interesting, also, Betty, why he called his girlfriend and not 911. Maybe it was just one of the numbers programmed. But I guess we'll certainly find out.</s>NGUYEN: Exactly. Call someone who, if nothing else, can call authorities to make sure they know that I'm alive and how to get to me.</s>LEMON: Absolutely. And we'll probably learn after their release, maybe there will be a news conference.</s>NGUYEN: What a story it is, though.</s>LEMON: Yes. All right, Betty. Thank you very much for that. So just how bad is the weather on that mountain? Let's check in now with CNN's Chad Myers. Chad, how bad is the weather there?</s>CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Much better today. Yesterday it was kind of an ugly day, not much visibility at all. Now, this is not a lot like the climbers that went missing in the past. These guys were in -- on a Timberline Lodge Trail, and it's right at about 6,000 feet. Here's Portland. We'll fly you back out here to Mt. Hood. Mt. Hood is almost 10,500 feet tall. But this trail that these guys were probably on here that we don't know how far they went off the trail, but anyway, along the tree line itself, hence the Timberline Trail. And so, as they were going around, if you go all the way around, all the way around this thing, it's a 40-mile hike. Pretty significant hike. But the problem was yesterday. No matter where you were hiking, the winds were blowing about 50- or 60-miles-per-hour, and the weather was really very cold. Right now, here's a live shot from Mt. Hood. This is that government cam. This is U.S. 26. It's one of the highways here. These cars will move every once in a while. Temperature now 21, but it feels like about 6 degrees out there with the wind-chill factor. So it is still a cold day out there. But at least they know where they are. They're in a snow cave. They're keeping themselves warm, and the climbers and searchers will get to them fairly soon.</s>LEMON: Can't say it enough. Good news.</s>MYERS: You bet.</s>LEMON: All right. Chad, appreciate that. Thank you.</s>PHILLIPS: A developing story right now at out Cambridge, Maryland. This is live -- these are live pictures coming to us from our affiliate WBAL. We appreciate this. Firefighters working this blaze right now. We're told it's a large fire downtown. It's at the Shore Bid Auction and Antique store building, the 400 block of Race Street, we're told. Crews from ten are fire companies are on the scene. No injuries have been reported so far, but that area has been blocked off to the public. Not sure if there's anybody still inside, but it has been completely evacuated. But it's a large fire right now happening there at the Shore Bid Auction and Antique store building, 400 block of Race Street. We'll be following that. Thanks to these live pictures from our affiliate, WBAL. Eight hours till the last polls close on primary day in Michigan. It's all about the economy, and it's all about the Republicans. John McCain's banking on independent voters to boost him to a second-straight primary victory. But Mitt Romney's counting on his native state to turn his campaign around. Less at stake for the Democrats. The state is being punished for moving its primary up, so no Democratic delegates are up for grabs. Hillary Clinton is the only major candidate right now on that Democratic ballot. Jobs, homes, hopes. Too many people in Michigan have lost all three. And you can bet that's guiding their decisions at the polls today. Here's CNN's Chris Lawrence.</s>CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Unemployment was up. Mortgages went into meltdown. And the building blocks of one small business, crumbled.</s>BILL CAVERLY, UNEMPLOYED CONTRACTOR: There's no work for what I did.</s>LAWRENCE: Bill Caverly hasn't worked since his construction company went under last year. It was a business he had taken over from his dad.</s>CAVERLY: You can't go into church or into the grocery store without meeting somebody who's having a hard time.</s>LAWRENCE: Bill says Michigan needs a president with business experience, not someone who just extends tax cuts for the middle class.</s>CAVERLY: I'd rather have the tax cuts for business, because if you give a business a tax cut, you're going to go ahead and they're going to hire people.</s>LAWRENCE: And he wants a candidate to explain how they cut spending to pay for it.</s>CAVERLY: I just heard it from Mitt Romney on the TV. He was talking about change. He's going to stop the spending. I don't know how one guy can do it unless they give the president a line item veto.</s>LAWRENCE: Only Mike Huckabee favors going that far. So many people have lost their jobs and left town, pews sit empty at First Baptist Church in Sterling Heights. John Sansoterra is a painting contractor who says he competes with companies that hire illegal immigrant workers, a problem made worse by the bad economy.</s>JOHN SANSOTERRA, SMALL BUSINESS OWNER: Even builders or maybe other painting companies that were, you know, above board kind of feel like they have to go this direction in order to stay afloat.</s>LAWRENCE: He disagrees with John McCain's support for a guest worker program. Economically, John likes Mitt Romney's promise to help the auto industry and Rudy Giuliani's plan to reduce corporate taxes. But neither will get his vote in the primary, because he wants to elect a true social conservative.</s>SANSOTERRA: Granted, the temptation is there of what can help me economically, what could, you know, maybe be better. But you know, for us, the social comes first.</s>LAWRENCE (on camera): This just goes to show you, even in a state dominated by unemployment, other issues will play a part. But make no mistake, Michigan's economy and the best man or woman to fix it will be on a lot of voters' minds. Chris Lawrence, CNN, Warren, Michigan.</s>PHILLIPS: Are you marking your election calendar? We've been to Iowa and New Hampshire with a wee stop for Wyoming in between. The Michigan primary is going on then. And then on Saturday South Carolina holds its Republican primary and Nevada holds caucuses. The Democrats get their turn in South Carolina one week later, and then Florida holds its primary on the 29th. On February 5th, Super Tuesday, 24 states hold primaries, caucuses or, in the case of West Virginia, a Republican nominating convention. California's the biggest prize, with 370 Democratic delegates and 170 Republican delegates at stake. Now, for more on presidential candidates and their next stops, go to CNNPolitics.com. It's your one-stop shop for all things political.</s>LEMON: And later this hour, we should learn more about the cause of last summer's bridge collapse in Minnesota. The National Transportation Safety Board is holding a news conference on the August 1 catastrophe that killed 13 people.</s>BILL WAGNER, BRIDGE COLLAPSE SURVIVOR: I was very fortunate that the site of the freeway that collapsed in, it took my truck. And the reason I was fortunate was because there was a bus load of kids in front of me, and if it wouldn't have fallen off like that, I would have hit those kids.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They missed the edge by what looks like feet.</s>WAGNER: And I was right behind them.</s>LEMON: CNN's Susan Roesgen covered the I-35 West collapse for us when it happened, and she joins us now from Chicago. The big question then, Susan, was, you know, how -- where are my loved ones and how could this happen? And I think they're trying to answer that today.</s>SUSAN ROESGEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, they're still trying to answer that, Don. You know, in the early days there were so many theories about what might have caused that bridge collapse. But right now the investigation seems to be focusing on the steel plates, called gusset plates, that hold the steel beams of a bridge together. It was August 1 when that I-35 bridge right there in downtown Minneapolis collapsed in just six seconds. It fell more than ten stories, dragging more than 100 cars with it into the Mississippi River. You just heard from some of the survivors. Thirteen people were killed there. Now the investigation is not over. The NTSB has been looking at a computer model of what might have caused this bridge collapse. They've been examining the pieces of the wreckage. But again, they seem to be focusing on those steel plates, the gusset plates. And what's really frightening, those gusset plates are used in the design of bridges all across the country. Thousands of bridges have those very same plates that are used to hold the beams together. In Minnesota, the governor is talking about now replacing dangerous bridges, and he's promising to have the money to do it.</s>GOV. TIM PAWLENTY, MINNESOTA: This bill contains $225 million worth of local bridge money. This will replace 600 local bridges in the state of Minnesota. Heightened concern about bridge safety and bridges in Minnesota. And this is an appropriate time I think to take the money that's available that we'd otherwise be spending on other things, in my view probably less important or less needed.</s>ROESGEN: The National Transportation Safety Board, Don, is going to have this news conference in about 20 minutes now, so we should get more information on what they think now in this ongoing investigation really might have caused that collapse.</s>LEMON: All right. So you call those braces a gusset brace. Besides those braces, I'm sure they're -- they have to be looking at something else, in case that doesn't pan out. What are the other possible causes the NTSB has?</s>ROESGEN: Well, you know, Don, as strange as it may sound, very early on a theory that was presented and taken seriously was that it could even have been some corrosive acid from years of accumulated pigeon droppings on that bridge that might have weakened particular areas of the bridge. There was also, as we know, the ongoing construction. That's why they say more people were not killed in that collapse. Two of the lanes were shut down, because there was repaving going on. The National Transportation Safety Board says that the weight of the equipment and the piles of sand and the concrete on the bridge when it collapsed was roughly 275 tons. And they want to know whether that extra weight could have contributed to the collapse in some way. So, yes, we're going to hear about these gusset plates, but there may be more factors that they'll be telling us about when that news conference starts in about 20 minutes.</s>LEMON: Yes. And I remember them talking early on, too, about possible corrosives like for, you know, getting rid of snow and that kind of thing. So they weren't sure.</s>ROESGEN: That's true, too.</s>LEMON: All right. Susan, thank you very much for that report. And we have live coverage of the NTSB's update on the bridge collapse coming up in Washington. That will happen at the bottom of the hour. And we'll go live to Minneapolis to hear what the city's mayor has to say.</s>PHILLIPS: Confirmation from North Carolina that remains found Saturday are those of a missing pregnant Marine. Investigators also are rejecting the suspect's claim that she committed suicide. An autopsy shows Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach died of blunt force trauma to the head. Police are keeping quiet on the search for her alleged killer, but Marine Corporal Cesar Laurean is now being featured on the "America's Most Wanted" Web site. Meantime authorities are addressing some of the criticism of their handling of Lauterbach's disappearance.</s>SHERIFF ED BROWN, ONSLOW COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA: The best evidence in this case suggests that Maria Lauterbach was already dead before she was reported missing on December the 19. After December the 19th, 2007, the only thing that any investigation could have accomplished was to bring to light what had already occurred. I thank God and I am perfectly comfortable with the knowledge that nothing my office could have done would have prevented the death of Maria Lauterbach.</s>PHILLIPS: Lauterbach had accused Laurean of rape and was set to testify against him at a military hearing.</s>LEMON: Bad news begets bad news on the big board. Avert your eyes. You don't really want to see it. We're headed live to New York. Susan Roesgen [SIC] is going to tell us -- Susan Lisovicz, I should say, is going to tell us what this skidding sound on Wall Street is all about.</s>PHILLIPS: Plus, cloned meat? Uncle Sam says it won't hurt you.