Tumbling Down

Imagine. if you will, driving down a major metropolitan bridge in the heart of the rush hour. Suddenly, the ground underneath you buckles, cars start disappearing in front of you, and either you fall into the river or come face-to face with broken steel girders and cracked slabs of concrete. Either you survive this or you don't.

No need to imagine. This actually happened one week ago on what used to be the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, which was traveled on by an estimated 140,000 cars daily. So far there are five dead, 100 injured and eight missing.

This is a disaster that could have happened just about anywhere. Roads, bridges and utilities decades old have gone without improvements. The I-35W bridge, built in 1967, was deemed "structurally deficient" back when it was last inspected in 2005. It wasn't supposed to be replaced until 2020.

The infrastructure is what it is because no one wants to spend the money for upkeep. Not politicians who run on "no new taxes" platforms, nor voters who don't want to pay their taxes. It seems we have two needless wars to pay for.

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has vetoed major transportation bills (and the legislature failed to override them) for this reason. Now he wants to declare a special session so the legislature can pass a gas tax (or fee, as he likes to call them), and it's only because he's been forced to do something.

It'll be a long time before we know the cause of the collapse, but one thing we do know: It wasn't terrorism. There weren't any explosions that we know of, so it's ridiculous to make that assumption. But that's what the Department of Homeland Security does best--unnecessarily scaring people to justify its existence.

Since the information about what happened in the initial stages after the collapse was slow in coming, the Twin Cities TV stations treated us to the usual local news fodder about so-called "first responders" (a post 9/11 term) giving comfort to the afflicted, as well as interviews with folks who claimed that they wouldn't be alive if they hadn't worn their seat belt (try telling that to the families of the dead and missing who probably were wearing their belts). And there was too much emphasis on the kids who were rescued from a bus stuck on the bridge. Are they implying that adults are chopped liver?

In the following days, the network news anchors parachuted in to do their broadcasts for a night, then returned to New York. President and Mrs. Bush were also here to look at the situation, then went back to Washington. Then they offered words of sympathy as well as promises to find the money to repair the bridge.

One question bothered me throughout this crisis: What if this had happened in New York City? There are a few bridges crossing the Hudson River that could easily have gone down, with ten time more traffic than in Minneapolis. If this were New York, broadcast and cable news coverage would be wall-to-wall, President Bush and Congress would be taking immediate action, and the country would be mourning for several days. If this had happened in New York, Minneapolis would be quickly forgotten the way the Oklahoma City was after 9/11/01.

The bridge will be back in a few years (despite some people saying it could be sooner than that), so commuters can once again enjoy the sights of downtown Minneapolis at night--the lights and steam of office buildings reflected by the Mississippi River, along with the bumpers of the vehicles in front of you. And this time remembering that what happened here on August 1, 2007 could have easily happened to you or me.