The Day They Died

Nothing we read in the paper or heard on the drive-time news during our own morning commutes would have led us to believe that this would be anything but an ordinary day in the Twin Cities. There was plenty of sunshine and, according to the forecast, another day with a high in the upper eighties was on the way, with the kind of sticky dew points that made us wonder what people did before cars were air-conditioned. A thunderstorm was possible in the evening.

It promised to be, in hoary newspaper parlance, a slow news day, if you didn’t count the latest Britney Spears silliness and Phil Spector’s murder trial in California. The most significant information of the morning involved, as it had nearly every day for the past four years, the war in Iraq and, a breaking development, the hospitalization of U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts following a seizure. Here at home, Boof Bonser would be starting that night for the Twins, who were struggling to stay above the .500 mark and still waiting for their second-half rally. Major road construction on Interstate–35W and the Crosstown on the south side of the metro area would make the commute, for tens of thousands of drivers, a slower than usual beginning and end of the work day.

But who, now nearly four months later, remembers what happened (or didn’t) on August 1 until a few minutes after 6 that evening? What most of us recall about that day begins when we first heard the news about “the bridge,” and our memories include the commonplace and otherwise unmemorable things we were doing the instant we heard it.

Most Twin Citians had crossed the I–35W Bridge countless times, yet it took a few moments for many of us to form a picture of it in our minds. Though it had performed an essential function near the center of the metro area since 1967—linking downtown Minneapolis and the West Bank of the University of Minnesota with southeast Minneapolis, the U of M’s East Bank, and the sprawling suburban and exurban reaches north and east of the city and, eventually, Duluth and the North Shore—it lacked the clear and immediately visualized aspect of the Stone Arch, Third Avenue, Lake Street, Wabasha, Ford, and Mendota Bridges, to name only a few of the familiar local spans. If someone mentioned the “I–35W bridge,” a reasonable response was, “Which one?”—because, until 6:05 p.m. on August 1, there were two major bridges and several highway overpasses along the busy stretch of interstate between Lino Lakes and Apple Valley on the north and south margins of the metro.

What, at suppertime on August 1, became the I–35W Bridge had been an inelegant and uninteresting slab of freeway between inelegant and (mostly) uninteresting Washington and University Avenues—a flat, nearly straight, 1,907-foot length of roadway, sixty-four feet above the Mississippi River at its center point, but crossing more flats, roads, tracks, and miscellaneous dry ground than water. Its eight traffic lanes had been squeezed down to a pair in each direction while workers employed by a Minnesota outfit called Progressive Contractors, Inc., repaired and resurfaced its deck. Though, afterward, there were rumors of a “swaying motion” and “unusual vibrations,” as well as more reliable reports of concern among bridge inspectors dating back a number of years, no one seemed to have been aware of anything that would make crossing the bridge at rush hour in the late summer of 2007 anything worse than a monotonous crawl.

Indeed, in the hours and days that passed after the collapse, one of the most unsettling questions was how such an ordinary structure could become such an extraordinary wreck. The pictures of broken concrete and mangled ironwork were war-zone and earthquake images we associate with other, more dangerous parts of the world. Even the dreaded tornadoes of which we’re reminded almost daily between late March and the end of September don’t seem to do this kind of damage, which still seems, in the videos and photos, almost supernaturally violent. The cars and vans and trucks flipped, battered, and flattened in the mess didn’t have a chance.

The fact that many more Minnesotans have perished in individual tornadoes, blizzards, floods, and fires over the years—and that, exactly two weeks later, thirty-six persons died in a bridge collapse in China—has done nothing to diminish our shock at what seemed to be the sheer randomness of the I–35W event. A bridge going down in Minnesota, with significant loss of life and property damage—and, by all credible accounts, without the involvement of a terrorist, saboteur, or drunken barge operator—simply seemed inconceivable and helps explain the news flashes, front-page headlines, and overnight appearances by marquee journalists from around the world. Somebody calculated the odds of dying in a bridge collapse as 100 million to one, which is 100 times greater than the odds of dying in a commercial plane crash. Our chances of being killed in a spin-out and collision while approaching, departing, or driving across a standing bridge are far worse than either.