Seems like the bridge just collapsed.
What a nightmare. You’re driving, and then it collapses. Crazy. Right now the death count is at 3, here’s hoping it doesn’t get any higher.
holy shit, just saw this…
horrible
Estimates of up to 100 cars/trucks on the bridge at the time. Very few are visible in the pics/videos. Plus a bike path/walk way under the bridge. Death toll could be much higher.
I am not a religious person, but something about seeing your hometown as the lead story on the Australian news really makes you understand the meaning of the expression “there but for the grace of god.”
A few random thoughts that ran through my head on the (long) drive in to work today…
We live in a society where information transfer is instantaneous. And so when something tragic happens, we are all party to it, virtually in real time. And I remember sitting, transfixed in horror and sadness, and watching things like Colombine, Oklahoma City, Sago Mine, VA Tech. Just a gut-wrenching sadness that makes you feel powerless. You take everything in, and check the Web feeds, and flip channels and refresh your homepage waiting for snippets of breaking news, for details, any details.
But for all the sadness, for all the sense of community-through-tragedy it creates, there is always a distance. A sense of surrealness, of “that-doesn’t-happen-here-ness.”
And then, one day, it’s YOUR town that everyone is watching. YOUR home on the national news. On the BBC. And probably on freaking Al Jazeera. The phone starts ringing and it’s people in Florida, cousins in New Jersey, your grandma in Iowa. “Are you okay? Are you dead?” No, you say. I’m not dead. And, thankfully, neither are the vast majority of the people here. In a city of 3 million people, we should feel lucky the number of casualties was so small.
But of course we don’t. We don’t because we’ve all driven that bridge a thousand times, whether we commute over it daily or not. We don’t because those people are just like us–driving home from work, zoned out on a hot summer afternoon in bumper-to-bumper traffic, mindlessly flipping radio stations and fidgeting in our seats because our legs keep sticking to the leather. We don’t because “those people” could very well have BEEN us.
WE could have had the Twins tickets, the dentist appointment, the happy hour date downtown. Just like all those other tragedies, it wasn’t us. But this time? This time it could have been.
And after the phone calls and e-mails and text messages are made, after we have assured ourselves that all of our friends and family are safe–and assured our friends and family that, likewise, WE are safe…what then? We wander around with that sense of stomach churning sadness, that weird schism between “good lord, this is really going to fuck up the commute” and “I can’t believe people DIED here.” We go about our lives, driving to work, going for a jog, listening to music…doing normal, everyday, Midwestern things. And we feel…guilty. And sad. And relieved. And annoyed. And…
When it happens somewhere else, you are saddened. You grieve. And then you move on. The pang of emotions you feel, the “shock and awe,” the rawness of it all, fades away because the daily reminders of the event disappear as well. News coverage trickles off, and pretty soon the only relevance to the rest of the world is just a footnote on the anniversary date.
And now, the shoe is on the other foot. On a city-wide scale, we’ve never had to drive past an accident site. We’ve never been left staring at a gaping hole in the ground, asking ourselves “what went wrong? why then? why here?” We’ve never been left to deal with the rubble and pick up the pieces after all the cameras have gone and the empathetic spotlight has turned somewhere else.
What will the next few weeks, months, years be like? I don’t know. But I’m sure we’ll deal. We’re Minnesotans. Stoic. Hearty. Passive-aggressive. We’ll offer our neighbors a hand, donate blood, and make way too much hotdish to share with our co-workers and family because we need something to keep our idle hands busy. We’ll say our goodbyes and hold our remembrances in our own private ways. And, eventually, we’ll move forward. Not on, necessarily, but forward. We’ll be able to bitch about our commutes again, drive across bridges without second guessing, and complain about the road construction.
I guess I don’t know how I feel about that…