The collapse of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis last week has been the big news item of the week for everyone in the vicinity of my office. The building I work in is right on I-35W very near to the south bank of the river. The bridge that collapsed is one that I see close-up every weekday (and many weekends) - I cross it twice a day commuting to work, and pass under it twice a day when I head out for lunch. I returned from vacation to find that it had dropped from under several dozen vehicles that were tracing my usual route home at my usual time.
The next two days at the office were surreal. In the first place it was not easy getting there. Not only was this bridge gone, but its nearest neighbors were closed (and still are). There were police lines protecting the entire area, and my parking ramp had been commandeered as temporary parking for the rescue personnel who were on the scene. Upon seeing how much the rescue workers and the office workers were in each other's way the University decided to send everyone in my building home that day and close close it for the next day. I was one of the few who were permitted (expected) to enter the office on Friday (somebody has to be around to keep an eye on all the servers). This meant crossing several police lines with checkpoints. Between the place I parked and my office building I had to show my ID three times.
That first day was spent mostly looking out the windows and marveling at how such a collapse could happen. There was also much talk of co-workers who narrowly avoided disaster - the person who had crossed the bridge moments before its collapse, and the person who was stranded on the on-ramp to the bridge, and the professor who was on the bridge and walked away after her car fell 20-30 feet (the silver Prius that is visible in many news photos is hers). I spent some time on our upper floor and got a couple of photos of the scene from my vantage point:
Most of the wreckage of the bridge is hidden from view in the river valley. Many news photos show this quite well - check out the coverage at www.startribune.com or www.pioneerpress.com if you are interested. The bridge in the background is for a local city street (Tenth Ave.), not a highway, and it has been closed since the collapse.
The second day at work was also very odd. The building was eerily silent, with only a couple people in the entire building. My cubicle is in the basement, but I had to make many trips upstairs to see how things were looking. Given the difficulty traveling near my building I didn't get outside for lunch, even if I had, most of the area around my building has been cordoned off. The area was subject to power shortages due to damage to transmission lines near the bridge, so I spent much of my day going desk to desk shutting off computers.
There has, of course, been much talk of what happened - how could a bridge just collapse? Other than the usual large dose of human-interest stories, most of the media attention has been focused on how recent inspections have shown the bridge to be in less than tip-top shape, but it was supposedly still safe. Throughout the summer a resurfacing project has been underway on the bridge, but little has been said about how that might have impacted the bridge. For this project crews have been working with half of the lanes closed to remove and replace a layer of the concrete decking. Given that half of the lanes were closed at the time of the collapse it is hard to imagine that the construction was not somehow a major factor. The weight load on the bridge would have been at most half of what it usually carries, so that seems like a very odd time for stress and fatigue to finally take it down. The Feds are confident that they can figure out what the cause of the failure was, but as usual those answers will be a long time coming.
So will a new bridge. I was impatiently looking forward to the end of this construction project so that we could get back to somewhat normal traffic in my area by the end of the summer. Now it looks like we'll be lucky to be back to normal by the end of 2008.
2 comments:
(Jeffy and I had lunch shortly after this post was put up, so most of our thoughts were already aired.)
The pictures are surreal. I know that all the pictures we've seen from this site over the past week are "real," but yours seem somehow different because I've seen these views from your office as well. We toyed with going to look at the site after we all had lunch, but since Susan wasn't feeling very well (and we weren't sure how close we could get anyway) we decided to let the AP photogs show us around.
The investigation will be most interesting, though as always they don't produce any conclusions until interest in the event as almost entirely waned. Your workplace gives your focus some staying-power!
That is amazing... And so incredibly scary. Thank God you weren't on the bridge that day.
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