MINNEAPOLIS – With all the victims believed to have been recovered, federal investigators gave state transportation officials clearance Tuesday to pull away the concrete deck of the collapsed interstate bridge.

The recovery steps kicked into a higher gear a day after divers pulled the body of construction worker Gregory Jolstad from the Mississippi River, about three weeks after the eight-lane bridge fell Aug. 1.

“This community will now be on the road to recovery,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters said at a briefing near the collapse site.

Before all 13 known victims were accounted for, crews had proceeded delicately with debris removal. Cranes and other heavy duty equipment are now being moved in to extract bigger pieces.

National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Mark Rosenker, who joined Peters, said parts of the southern approach span and the concrete deck could be cleared away. Investigators want crews to move more slowly on the steel underpinnings of the bridge.

Construction cranes are being shipped into the collapse site on barges, They will be used to extract massive chunks of concrete from the bridge deck lying in the river and blocking the channel for boats. The chunks of bridge are being moved to two sites, one just upriver and the other just downriver, where they’ll be available to investigators.

Officials said the work could start as early as Tuesday.

The NTSB will have a crew on site into November, Rosenker said, but most of his staff has returned to Washington to do lab analysis using computer models and more closely inspect parts already collected.

Those include some of the beam-tying gusset plates, but Rosenker cautioned reporters against too much focus on those as a cause of the collapse. “There’s more to it than the gusset plates,” he said.

The city and state became eligible for more federal assistance for the recovery from the Interstate 35W collapse when President Bush declared an emergency, the White House said. State officials said the federal relief money would be used to cover costs racked up by the search and rescue efforts, security at the bridge site and overtime for law enforcers.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty said the declaration applies to certain rescue costs before Aug. 15 and comes with the expectation that there will be some local matching dollars. But he said he planned to ask Bush to loosen some of the restrictions and lengthen the aid window.

Bush was scheduled to visit Minneapolis on Tuesday and get a briefing on the bridge collapse.