The other night just as we were setting down to eat Blaine called. Laura didn't recognize his voice so thought I was just getting some crank call. Blaine told me about the bridge
collapse in Minneapolis.
I rode on that bridge countless times. It is not very far from where the University is and where I lived is only downriver from it on Lake Street. You can see it
here. It is just above the yellow arrow. The bridge that I went across almost everyday that I lived in Minnesota is down river and is called 94 (my apartment building was just at the end of the shield with the number 94 in it, north of Lake Street. I was only a block from the Lake Street Bridge. For awhile before I moved the Lake Street Bridge was so dangerous that buses had to stop at the edge of the bridge, unload their passengers into little vans, and then have the passengers taken across the bridge to be picked up by another bus. The span, a beautiful old steel bridge, was
replaced with a new
concrete hulk, one that looks very much like the marvel of modern engineering that went down.
At least the death toll seems much smaller than was originally thought. Given how
awful it looks it is hard to believe. One young man who was on the school bus is being hailed as a hero because he helped all the young children get out. It was from one of the more ethnic and poorer
neighborhood summer school and returning from a day at the lake, I think.
Here is a picture of
35W on a normal day. You can see how big it is and how much traffic was on it for it to be bumper to bumper as it was when the bridge went down.
It gave me a funny feeling to hear all the old Minnesota voices and to see how they were coping. I saw some videos of eyewitnesses and I have to believe Minnesotans took it more calmly than most other places would have. That old Scandinavian/Lutheran grit I guess, although the young hero is named Hernandez.
