Sometimes you are just plain lucky

I live in Maplewood, a suburb on the north side of Saint Paul. I work in the Uptown section of Minneapolis (I still haven’t figured out why Uptown is south of Downtown). My usual route for getting home from work was to to get on 94 east, take the 35W north out of downtown and across the Mississippi river, and depending on the traffic exit to some residential streets or continue on to Hwy36 east to get home.

Last summer, they started doing some work on the bridge across the Mississippi, resurfacing and such The usual four lanes were down to two, so I would often exit before the bridge, cutting through the U of MN campus. August 1, 2007 I was heading home from work 5:30-5:40ish, and figured traffic might be letting up and I would take the bridge to see how the construction was going. I don’t build bridges, but I am in construction so that sort of thing is interesting to me.

Some of you may recognize the name “35W Bridge”, it is the one that collapsed in to the Mississippi River, killing 13, injuring about 100 others.

When I took the exit from 94 on to 35, traffic looked ok, but by the time I got around the next bend I could tell it would be a 20+ minute trip to get across so I took the Washington Avenue exit, cutting through the U of MN campus, meandering some side streets to get to the grocery store near my house. 6:05PM is when the bridge went down.

I heard about it from my mom, she called me just before 7:00, I was walking back to my Jeep from the grocery store. She had heard something about the bridge, knew it was near my work, and wanted to check on me. When she said the bridge had collapsed, my first first reaction was “what? no way.” Mom didn’t have much info, but being a mom she was worried and wanted to make sure I was ok. One of those things it could have happened within 100 miles of where I was and she would call to check up on me. Gotta love her. So I assured her I was fine, and when she hung up I still wasn’t even sure what bridge she was talking about.

I found out when I got in the Jeep. It was something I never would have imagined happening.

Locally, and nationally, I think many of us were dumbfounded, and in a bit of shock over the following days as rescue, and then recover efforts took place. And then there was the pride at how the people of this area, from the emergency workers down to average citizens who just jumped in and did what had to be done to help folks out in a crisis situation. I remember thinking about how I hoped I would have reacted like that had I been there myself.

It wasn’t until a few days later actually that it struck me… I almost was. Had a few things been just slightly different, I very well could have been on that bridge when it collapsed. When I left work, I had every intention of crossing that way. Had I left a bit later, had traffic been a bit lighter, had I not decided I wanted to get home quicker… alter any or all of those items just a bit, and there would have been a very real chance of me being there at 6:05pm.

Divine intervention? Butterfly effect? Dumb luck? who knows.

The image are from April 7, 2008. Eight months after the collapse, and about 8 months before they expect the new bridge to be completed. I have a few others, including some from about a month after the collapse in my gallery. There is also a very nice article that includes a history of the bridge, details on the collapse and images, including security camera footage of the actual collapse on .